The Sagittarius New Moon: #Ceasefire
The archer's arrow points us in a new direction of hope
Hi everybody,
How are y’all holding up out there?
Today’s new moon comes to us from the part of the sky ruled by the adventurous, idealistic, and philosophical Archer, and I’m writing to you from a bottom bunk bed, bundled up in my grey fleece robe next to my two lethargic dogs and a sick kid.
Some good news: During the time it took to write this post, the he UN general assembly overwhelmingly voted to demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Hooray! New moons = new beginnings, and in Sagittarius, we’re looking at new beginnings in the realm of integrated global wisdoms and truths. Here’s hoping! I get into a bit of the astrology of it below, along with some reflections on truths that can come out in the washing machine.
Thanks for reading. Happy New Moon & New Beginnings to you, as we lean into the final stretch of this wild and crazy year <3
Morale along the Trail…
We’re already well into December, and my little family and I have been pretty much nonstop-sick since the week before Halloween, with only a couple little breaks here and there. Def no need for a pity party, but I have to say, feeling sick is getting reallly old. Pink eye, coughing, nausea, vomiting, body aches, congestion… you name it, we’ve had it… and seem to keep on getting it.
The Covid tests keep coming up negative, but it seems like giving a name to these emerging viruses and their mutations is so last year, anyway. All I know is that the sicknesses feel… different than they did when I was growing up. I don’t remember all the systems in my body being attacked simultaneously, do you? It was like, a stomach bug OR a respiratory flu, not both, right? …. errrhh. Not so now.
Being at home so much, without the endless distractions of the daily grind and amidst the highly contrasting media-bytes of sparkly Christmas cookies and kids stuck under grey rubble, it has been trying to stay positive. This morning, I had a phrase from the 90’s video game Oregon Trail II running through my head: “Morale is low”.
I’m getting the feeling that I’ve referenced the term “pre-school petri dish” far more than I’d care to in this newsletter (or in my life), and I do want to apologize for that. I thought about just keeping the current state of my health out of this one, but I’m at a point where feeling unwell is so pervasive in my current reality that it would feel incongruent to ignore. (And turns out, there might be lessons to learn from the petri dish, after all.)
Yesterday my daughter woke up feeling 99% and decided to go back to school for the first time in what seems like eternity. I was so looking forward to catching up on some online classes and work emails and sleeeeep for a couple of hours- a quick break after so many solid days of parenting while fatigued. While we were waiting in the drop-off line, though, we heard an awful sound behind us, and turned around to see another 5 year old projectile vomiting all over the floor. Oh boyyyy. They ushered him out and quickly cleaned up the mess, but my daughter was distraught and then told me she actually still felt sick. She didn’t have any symptoms, but I wasn’t going to argue with her.
So here we are at home together again, for yet another day of the endless time-warp that is being a parent in the dark, sick winters of our times. Overall, I’m feeling incredibly lucky and grateful that both my partner and I can mostly work from home and set our own schedules. I can only begin to imagine the stress all you parents out there feel with sick kids (or chronic illness…) who have to go out to work or scramble to find childcare last minute or risk losing your job….damn. These times are so tough. I see you and feel for you so much.
Along these lines, I read an opinion piece in the NYT yesterday “Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to be a Better Journalist” that really hit a chord for me, as. a writer and recently very sick person. Journalist Ed Yong writes:
“In this status quo, people are expected to ignore the threat of infection, pay through the nose if they get sick and face stigma and ridicule if they become disabled.
Journalism can and should repudiate that bargain. We are not neutral actors, reporting on the world at a remove; we also create that world through our choices, and we must do so with purpose, care, and compassion.
I witnessed almost every publication that I once held in esteem become complicit in normalizing a level of death once billed as incalculable. Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values, and politics.
As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E/C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity.
Like the pandemic writ large, long Covid is not just a health problem. It is a social one, and must also be understood as such.
Contrary to the widespread notion that speaking truth to power means being antagonistic and cold, journalists can, instead, act as a care-taking profession- one that soothes and nurtures. And we are among the only professions that can do so at a scale commensurate with the scope of the crises before us.
We can make people who feel invisible feel seen. We can make everyone else look.”
I resonate with this so much: “Science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values, and politics.”
Same goes for journalism, philosophy, politics, business, government, and any system of thought created by humans. They’re all human endeavors, though many are construed, through clever marketing and propaganda, to be objective, neutral forces. Aas humans, as much as we are always seeking truth, I believe we are seeking nurturance and care even more.
Contrary to the widespread notion that speaking truth to power means being antagonistic and cold, we can, instead, act as a care-taking profession- one that soothes and nurtures.
So many ‘modern’ institutions and industries, including traditional journalism, carry with them the shadow of Sagittarius, an archetype with the reputation of the 'know-it-all’, the one who believes they have found an objective Truth with a capital T.
But what if the ultimate capital-T truth was as simple as “Be kind and care for one another”?
The New Moon might have a clue…
Today’s new moon is happening at 20-degrees Sagittarius, making a square aspect to Neptune in Pisces. Neptune, the god of the sea, in his home sign of Pisces, is the planet that rules the ethereal dreamland, a zoomed-out perspective, and liminal spaces. This new moon in Sagittarius represents striving toward new horizons, opportunities for novel adventures that unite disparate ideas and expand our existing perspectives. A square between the Sag new moon and Pisces Neptune could bring a sense of overwhelm or confusion to the newfound clarity of your goals, philosophies and inner truths.
The good news is, both Sagittarius and Pisces are ruled by Jupiter, the benific planet of expansion. So despite feelings of confusion, this square brings into focus the actions we are striving toward that can fulfill big-picture dreams in our lives. Today, if we squint, we can see hints of Sagittarian philosophical ideals merging with Piscean emotional ideals. If those seem at odds, we may just have to surrender to the soup, for the time being.
The Washing Machine Portal of Time
Like all folks born between late 1983-1985, my South Node is in the sign of Sagittarius. I just looked at my chart, and realized that today’s new moon at 20 degrees Sagittarius is happening at the exact same degree as my natal South Node AND my natal Neptune. So this soup is feeling extra… soupy (Neptune/Neptune), and also a bit karmic and heavy (hi there, South Node…).
For us early to mid 80s babies with our South Node in Sagittarius, our tendency is to be idealistic and quite visionary, yet somewhat naiive. In this lifetime, us Sagittarius South nodes are given a challenge to release the desire to be right all the time. We are tasked to purge the need to try to fix other people and situations, the desire to lead them toward our version of the truth (the truest truth! haha). Our opposite North Node in Gemini instead compels us toward a multi-hyphinate version of the truth- one that is collaborative, co-created, and social, and ultimately requires surrendering to the truth of the other in communication.
With this South Node activated by the moon, after having a bit of a breakdown from a kid tantrum and feeling hangry and overall sickness fatigue, I reached a moment of acceptance and gratitude. I suddenly had a feeling of release and surrender amidst the disappointment, FOMO, and low morale of being sick for a long time.
Just when you think you’re finally getting “better enough to work”, then wake up to pink eye and a swollen ear, and you have no other option but to be at home for days on end (and vegging out to movies all day isn’t even an option because your kid still has crazy energy even though she’s snotty AF, and you’re trying to be a semi-good parent re: screentime)… all you can do at that point is laugh. And stop stressing about lost time.
This feeling came up suddenly, coming from the sensation that being sick had, in a way, removed me from the underlying assumptions of “normal” time. I- for at least a moment- felt truly on the outside of a capitalist driven timeframe that is constantly and subconsciously motivated by the need to produce. I had a lovely feeling that I was living in my body’s actual timeframe, not the timeframe created by society or bosses or the man or whoever.
And then, zooming out a bit (with the help of Neptune and some lion’s mane tea) you can feel freedom. Freedom that is the simplicity of being allowed to float in non-linear time, for just a little while. Freedom that is floating in the timescape of this fragile yet strong human body, with sweet moments of play with my energized and snotty kid, with no way to rush the structured futures, goals, plans and parameters that will inevitably flood back in when the sickness subsides.
Sickness is like going into a washing machine… and sometimes it’s the only thing you can do to truly get [spiritually] clean.
As I float through this void-of-time, the answers that I had been stressing out about missing out on transmitted so much clearer through the ether. The South Node, aka the Tail of the Dragon, is all about the purge and release of something in order to create space to grow. With all the stomach issues going on around here, the purge has been rather literal! In addition to the physical, though, this new moon hitting my South Node and Neptune is making it feel clear that in order to move toward my big-picture dreams and visions, a deep letting go of outdated expectations is necessary.
In my 5th house of children, joy, and creativity, this new moon is bringing up a release of my expectations of what a parent/child relationship is supposed to look like, as well as how both joy and a creative career are supposed to function on the day-to-day.
I have so many things on my to-do list and an underlying stress that I’m “losing time”, and this can often takes away from quality moments of joy with my child, not to mention with myself. Being sick has made me see that the more I release the conditioned “truths” I hold in my mind about how these things work (i.e. I have to get my kid to school today so I can keep working on my courses and planning my next offering so I can survive in this rat race of a world…. ), the more free I feel to co-create something better and more aligned for me and my family, my community, and the world at large.
It’s been a powerful learning that I wasn’t exactly expecting to receive in this way, but I’ll take it. It’s already making the morale around here feel higher… a little bit more hopeful.
This New Moon coincides with Global Strike for Gaza and a ceasefire resolution: Hope for a new beginning?
Speaking of attempts to co-create something better, yesterday and today I have been supporting the Global General Strike for Gaza, by abstaining from purchasing anything and spending time learning and talking with my family about what is happening in Gaza.
18,205 Palestinian people have now been killed and almost 50,000 have been wounded in Israeli strikes on Gaza in just over two months of warfare, and 1200 Israelis have also been killed. Of the 18,000 + people killed in two months, over 40% of them, 7,000 +, have been children. I read a statistic, on my daughter’s 5th birthday in mid-November, that 5-year-olds represented the age group with the highest number of people killed. My heart breaks. There is no way that this can be justified.
The Global Strike was started by a coalition of Palestinian activists, who said:
“We expect the entire globe to join the strike, which comes in the context of a broad international movement involving influential figures. This movement stands against the open genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and the colonial settlement in the West Bank.”
Bisan Owda, a Gazan filmmaker with over 3 million followers, wrote on an Instagram Post, “If the politicians do not hear us, then we can strike from economic life and daily movement, and we can boycott everything, we can put pressure on them to stop supporting and blessing the massacre that is happening in Gaza.”
As I write this, the UN General Assembly is discussing and plans to vote on a draft resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas in the Gaza Strip. This General Assembly meeting was called in response to the horrifying Veto by the United States on the UN Security Council demand for ceasefire on Friday.
I’m following live updates via the Guardian right now. Here are a few excerpts:
Dennis Francis, president of the UN general assembly, is calling the ongoing violence a “humanitarian catastrophe”.
“Civilians should never undergo the level of suffering we are currently witnessing,” Francis said.
“Again, I ask, how many more thousands of lives must be lost before we do something? No more time is left. The carnage must stop,” Francis added.
Osama Mahmoud Abdelkhalek Mahmoud, UN representative for Egypt is warning that a failure to pass the resolution will legitimize genocide as a tool for war and lead to a war in the Middle Eastern region.
“This will unfortunately mean that genocide will be used as a tool for war, completely disregarding international law,” Mahmoud said.
“This will lead the region to a full-fledged war and it will jeopardize the creditability of this international organization,” he said.
And then, 4 minutes ago:
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative for the UN, called a ceasefire “dangerous”.
“We support affirming that Israel, like every single country on Earth, has the rights and the responsibility to defend itself from terrorism,” Greenfield said.
“So long as Hamas remains driven by its murderous ideology, any ceasefire right now would be temporary at its best, and dangerous at its worst,” she added.
And, finally this just in (!!) :
The UN ceasefire resolution has passed, as members demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
More details coming.
Wow. Ok. Yes.
This is something.
(*Holds breath for more details*)
The Sagittarian ideals of the United Nations & the United States’ Pluto Return
The United Nations was formed in 1945, just as World War II was coming to an end. Representatives from 50 countries gathered in San Francisco to draft a charter that they hoped would prevent another world war like the one they had all just lived through.
While a real shadow of Sagittarius is the need to be right all the time, the guiding light of the archetype is the unceasing quest for a unifying wisdom, one that goes beyond individual or local circumstances. The United Nations, as a relatively new concept of global decision making, aspires toward this unifying wisdom, offering a place for differing views to be discussed within the ultimate goals of avoiding war, upholding peace, and paving a path toward a more sustainable future for humanity.
As we can see clearly, though, having the platform or the ideology doesn’t always mean that everyone agrees. A universal wisdom is composed of individual actors with their own agendas, and some actors carry a lot of weight. To be a citizen of a still-powerful country that continues to uphold this clear lack of humanitarianism, this clear lack of true wisdom, feels humiliating and horrifying, and just… wrong. It is getting easier and easier to track the motivations behind our politicians actions, whether it be Democrat, Republican, or whatever.
As someone with even a basic understanding of trauma and human psychology should be able to see, relentless Israeli bombings of Palestinian people, even if they could be categorized as “self-defense”, will not do anything at all to help bring an end to the “murderous ideology” of a people who have been terrorized and systematically colonized through generations of cleansing and genocide. What the US rep to the UN is acquiescing to, in her statement, is a perpetual war of self defenses, eyes for eyes for eyes until the whole world is indeed blind.
Consider this headline from Saturday: US skips congressional review to approve emergency sale of tank shells to Israel. This sale, worth $106 million, is part of a larger package worth more than $500 million which includes 45,000 shells for Israel's Merkava tanks, regularly deployed in its offensive in Gaza.
While the majority of the world' is brought to their knees by the sickness of this capitalist, colonialist, winner-takes-all ideology that we must kill or be killed, the United States is doubling down. The United States, as a nation founded by victimized and traumatized Pilgrims, has perfected this ideology down to its very essence, believing it is the only way, the truth with a capital T.
Just as long Covid and chronic illnesses are easily belittled by our sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and our capitalist society that values people according to their productivity, the lives of innocent Palestinian people (and many others across the world) are being belittled, ignored, and ultimately killed for the same reasons.
Astrologically, we are reaching the end of the United States’ Pluto Return. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Pluto - the planet of the underworld, exposed secrets, death/rebirth, and deep, earth shaking shifts of power -has returned to the same place in the sky where it was when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Similar to the reality-check of the Saturn return that happens in an individual’s life every 30ish years, this Pluto return is the reality check for America.
It goes without saying that we’re in a time of great upheaval, great reckonings with our past, great diggings up of truths it would be easier to pretend not to see. The US was established when Pluto was in the last degrees of Capricorn, where he is again now. Capricorn is all about goal-setting, structure, ambition, climbing from the bottom of the sea all the way up to the highest peak. The United States certainly found its ways to reach great heights as a global superpower during the past 240-odd years. But now, bright light is being shed from many angles on the heads that were stepped on to get to this position of power… and it’s not a pretty picture.
In January of next year, Pluto moves into Aquarius, a sign all about humanitarianism, new technologies, and the future. Aquarius the water bearer describes one who digs elegant and high-tech channels so that water poured into them can reach a vast network of people.
This resolution for humanitarian ceasefire took the voices and actions of many from around the globe standing up to an outdated ideology. We don’t know how it will actually go down, and holding our breaths for a smooth end to this is probably not a good idea. But I do have hope: here is some evidence of people power, a hint at the world we can co-create if we step out of institutionalized time and American capitalist definitions of things for a while.
Whew. That was an unexpectedly long one. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me through the sickness and the untethering from time and the personal epiphanies and the General Assembly meeting and the Pluto Return and … all of it. Holy smokes…. Capricorn season is far more structured and way less long-winded than Sagittarius, I think!
I’ll see you in 2 weeks for the Cancer New Moon, friends.
Until then, Power to the People. Cheers to Abundant Hope. And Happy Holidays, however you choose to celebrate.
xoxo
Alison
I so clearly remember the forever sick days that became weeks. Now my youngest is in graduate school becoming a science journalist! Maybe we can recruit her to write about the issues of women and pain and all the ways that ripples out into our society. I loved the way you linked all the threads in this piece.
I saw the license plate "Jupiter" on my way home yesterday :) Happy new moon