scorpio full moon loading...
on the wisdom of opposites and keeping death front of mind
hi friends!!
This week, we have the full moon in Scorpio, exact on Friday morning. I love this full moon, and as I was reflecting on it, I remembered the newsletter I wrote during Scorpio season for the Taurus full moon, when I talked about the wisdom of opposites that resonates throughout the Tao Te Ching. As the Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation puts it:
“Therefore having and not having arise together;
Difficult and easy complement each other;
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow each other.”
This is to say that opposites require each other. Or, as Ram Dass puts it in his iconic debut book Be Here Now:
“Hippies create police. Police create hippies. If you’re in polarity you’re creating polar opposites. You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.”
These are complicated (and controversial!) spiritual teachings, but I have found them to be fundamental. They are the yin/yang symbol put into words: Opposites contain each other.
I think about this sort of dualistic, opposites-necessitate-each-other thing with every full moon, as the full moons always highlight one certain axis of the zodiacal wheel. In Scorpio season, I wrote about how the full moon in Taurus was a moment of spring in the midst of a dying season. Now, six months later and on the other side of the wheel of the zodiac, the full moon in Scorpio reminds us of the opposite, and of the same: In the midst of spring, as life abounds, this moon calls on us to remember death.
It’s a moment that reminds me of a teaching my meditation teacher often talks about, an intense shamanic practice wherein the shamans practice living as if death were always right there on the left shoulder, a constant reminder that this life is finite, forcing them radically into the present. It reminds me also of the Buddha’s five remembrances, which he teaches we should consciously sit with every day. They are:
This body is of the nature to age.
This body is of the nature to get sick.
This body is of the nature to die.
Everyone and everything I have ever loved will change, die, and I will be separated from them.
In the face of these truths, the only things I truly have are my actions. I cannot escape the consequences of them. My actions are the ground on which I stand.
If this sounds morbid, well, welcome to the Scorpio full moon. But I don’t mean it as a morbid thing, really. When I really sit with these practices, they don’t make me fearful, they make me present. They make me feel alive. They make me see life with a strange sort of clarity. That’s the way these strange nondual teachings work.
This is not to say there’s anything to fear about this moon (though I do think on a mundane collective level we might see a fall from grace or get a peek at the underbelly of power). Instead, I think the Scorpio full moon is a gorgeous taste of a witchy, Halloween-y, spooky moment at the height of spring, which is fun. It’s a moment for tarot cards and candles and baths and spells and gathering herbs and looking sexy and contemplating the wisdom of spiders and thinking about death.
What could make a girl feel more alive?
Enjoy the moon, my angels. And if you love this Tao Te Ching exploration, you might enjoy this lovely talk about Uranus moving into Gemini through the Taoist perspective from the great Adam Elenbaas.
On other fronts, I’m open for readings through the end of May. I’ll be closing my schedule again in June for a stretch as MY BOOK COMES OUT JUNE 2 (!), so let me know if you’d like to get in before then. I’m available for full birth chart readings, as well as more targeted hour-long and mini readings.
Love you all.
XO,
A