virgo eclipse!!!
on releasing perfectionism, and being in two places at once
hiiiiiiiiiiii !
I hope you’re all doing as well as you can be given the crazy state of the world and the skies.
I had a long flight today and I intended to spend it writing a long note about how astrology has been proven real once again with the U.S. going to war with Iran as Mars squares Uranus and as Saturn and Neptune conjoin (Iranian history is deeply aligned with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, and U.S. history is really intertwined with Mars-Uranus). I also wanted to take a big look ahead at the eclipse in Virgo coming through early tomorrow morning, but in perfect Mercury retrograde fashion, the wifi on the plane was spotty and I ended up spending most of the flight finishing Just Kids by Patti Smith and crying so hard I think I scared the people around me, so now I’m just finishing writing this on my phone while walking on the treadmill at the hotel.
The whole day felt like a sort of perfect encapsulation of the energy lately which feels a little scattered and frenetic and frankly terrifying on a global level but, at least for me, strangely a little playful and dreamy on a personal one, and I wanted to be sure to check in at least briefly to discuss the Virgo full moon eclipse, which is exact in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
This is a south node eclipse, and south node eclipses are all about releasing. In Virgo we’re asked to release some of the shadows of that sign — most acutely being perfectionism.
On the plane, I was thinking about this great article from The New Yorker last summer about the pain of perfectionism. It focuses on two researchers who have dedicated their lives to the study of it, and perfectionism, they’ve found, has links to depression, eating disorders and suicide.
“Perfectionism perpetuates an endless state of striving,” author Leslie Jamison writes. “It’s an affliction of futility, an addiction to finding masochistic refuge in the familiar hell of feeling insufficient. It might not feel good, but it feels like home.”
“If humanity is imperfection,” she writes later in the piece, “the only perfect woman is a dead one.”
The first time I ever met with a therapist, one of the first things she asked me was whether I was a perfectionist and I said no. I thought of perfectionists as perfect people, and I wasn’t one. I failed often. But I did — I do — want desperately to get it right all the time, and that’s what perfectionism is really all about.
If you don’t resonate with this idea of being a perfectionist, ask yourself where in your life you have that need to get it right feeling. Do you always need to make the right choice? Do you always need to say the right thing? Do you always need to know the right answer? Do you always need to be exactly right, expose no vulnerability, as a partner, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a professional? Do you always need to pray the right prayer? Do you always need to ask the right question? Do you always need to look exactly right, exercise exactly right, eat exactly right? If you don’t feel that anywhere in your life, tell me your secret, and also I don’t believe you.
For me, that sense of needing to do it right has dominated much of my spiritual exploration, and I said as much to my meditation teacher a few years ago.
“I think I need to do everything right to be loved,” I told her.
“You think you need to do everything right to be liked,” she corrected me. Because approval isn’t love. Love is a much more powerful force. Love loves imperfection, vulnerability, humanity, humility. That little tweak in the narrative really shook something clear in me.
Coming to honest terms with this part of ourselves can be tricky, because healing our relationship to perfectionism, as Jamison notes in her New Yorker piece, can become complicated — a new sort of perfectionism can emerge in ridding ourselves of perfectionism. It’s an issue I encountered during my own eating disorder recovery, and wrote about when I was at BuzzFeed News a few years ago.
“She may try to be an exemplary patient, never showing unregulated emotions and coming up with insights that demonstrate how readily she has internalized the message,” Jamison writes. “But exactly the opposite needs to happen: the patient needs to enact her struggle in the room, to be messy, irrational, resentful, out of control.”
And that is in so many ways the vibe of any full moon, especially a full moon eclipse: messy, irrational, out of control.
This moon comes as we have Mercury retrograde in Pisces, which is also sort of a messy and irrational and out of control vibe, and as the ruler of Virgo, Mercury rules this eclipse. It’s easy to see this as a foreboding, confusing lineup, but I think it has a lesson for us:
Near the end of Just Kids, Patti Smith writes of the work of going between heaven and earth that she and Robert Mapplethorpe (<3) often explored together.
“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm,” she writes. “He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
I can’t think of a better description of the Pisces-Virgo axis, as we’re pulled between Pisces mystical, emotional inclinations and Virgo’s earthly, logical details. Indeed, to make art we have to come back down from the ethereal world, but we also can’t get stuck here, and this tension between the vital need to be here on earth and not disassociate and do good and the remembrance of realms and realities beyond this one is our teacher for the week. Being with both, learning to balance both, is how we create art, on paper, on canvas, on film, in the very day to day-ness of how we live our lives, and how we build a better world.
I love you all very much. Be safe, be kind, be good listeners, take good notes, have fun.
XO,
A