Photo: Willow
The Moon is currently growing full in dewy and sublime Pisces, opposite the Sun in late Virgo, and it touched wounded healer Chiron in Pisces early this morning on its way to the peak.
This late-Pisces Full Moon (exact at 6:13 a.m. CST on September 19) is the Harvest Moon, the Full Moon closest to autumn equinox, so named because farmers could work well into the night under its light. The Harvest Moon, along with the Hunter's Moon and Beaver Moon in following months, rises earlier and sets later than the Full Moons in other months, providing more moonlit hours.
This Harvest Moon in Pisces has end-of-era themes radiating from its moonbeams, as well as an impetus to get much clearer on the things that are hurting and sickening us on this planet.
This is a re-post of an article I wrote for last year's Pisces Full Moon. The themes continue to apply, maybe moreso than ever. The nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan continues to unfold, two-and-a-half years after the initial event, and genetically modified alfalfa has just started contaminating the natural crop in the United States.
"A Chiron-Infused Pisces Full Moon, Pisces for the Aquarian Era, and Shifting Ideas Around Healing and Health" from the last Pisces Full Moon August 25, 2012:
"When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied."
- Herophilus, some 3rd/4th century doctor dude who fancied himself a philosopher
I read this quote recently on the back of a $13 package of smug hippie cereal that comes from the Canadian West Coast. There are a lot of smug hippies out there. The thing is, though, a lot of times, the smug hippies get it wrong.
I've been ill (though improving) for almost three years now. The military industrial complex disguised as Big Pharma disguised as an inexperienced doctor in a walk-in clinic slipped me poison in the form of an antibiotic called Cipro, and it devastated my system.
That said, I have to refute the quote by the good doctor up there. The best astrological work I've done has come during the time since I was poisoned. Since then, wisdom has revealed itself more fully, art has been expressed more richly. Not only was I able to fight, I was Plutonically strengthened to fight. Fighting those to-the-roots Plutonic fights gave me almost otherworldly strength at times, even as my body and physical system were weakened. Even as I was picking out words on the keyboard with a pencil in my mouth because my arms and wrists were not fully functional. Intelligence was most certainly applied. I don't think there can be any doubt that cosmic intelligence is coming through loud and clear.
People often say, "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." I really wish people would stop saying that. It's kind of an assholish thing to say, especially to people who have compromised health.
- Herophilus, some 3rd/4th century doctor dude who fancied himself a philosopher
I read this quote recently on the back of a $13 package of smug hippie cereal that comes from the Canadian West Coast. There are a lot of smug hippies out there. The thing is, though, a lot of times, the smug hippies get it wrong.
I've been ill (though improving) for almost three years now. The military industrial complex disguised as Big Pharma disguised as an inexperienced doctor in a walk-in clinic slipped me poison in the form of an antibiotic called Cipro, and it devastated my system.
That said, I have to refute the quote by the good doctor up there. The best astrological work I've done has come during the time since I was poisoned. Since then, wisdom has revealed itself more fully, art has been expressed more richly. Not only was I able to fight, I was Plutonically strengthened to fight. Fighting those to-the-roots Plutonic fights gave me almost otherworldly strength at times, even as my body and physical system were weakened. Even as I was picking out words on the keyboard with a pencil in my mouth because my arms and wrists were not fully functional. Intelligence was most certainly applied. I don't think there can be any doubt that cosmic intelligence is coming through loud and clear.
People often say, "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." I really wish people would stop saying that. It's kind of an assholish thing to say, especially to people who have compromised health.
Illness takes you far from the mainstream and from the mainstream ideals. You become what people are afraid of. Illness and pain isolate you, forcing you to fall back on yourself and on your faith and spiritual connection (if there are any to be had). They change and often deepen your perspective.
And it's from this perspective that people are able to bring forth some of their very, very best.
Some of the best writers, artists, activists, creatives, and people, period, on this planet live and have lived with illness and pain. They've worked under duress and wrested their contributions from the depths of despair and isolation. They've spoken from that very potent point at the edge between life and death, concentrated into the current moment by the withdrawal of the promise of a long and healthy life.
So Herophilus, your words certainly hold some of that Old Male Philosopher weight. They really do sound as if we should pay attention to them. But as per usual, the exalted and oft-quoted philosophical thinkers (mostly men) miss the real root truth.
Changing your diet, improving the water you drink, eating organic, exercising, spending time in nature, taking vitamins and supplements - these all help greatly. They're our responsibility. And as we move through a two-year Virgo-infused Mars cycle, refining and perfecting these things is a constant theme and focus.
But we're dealing with multi-layered and intentional attacks on our health and energetic systems on this planet. We're dealing with straw-that-breaks-the-camel's-back environmental pollution, electromagnetic pollution, psychic pollution, radioactivity. We're dealing with toxic corporate lifestyles packaged and sold to "the consumer." We're dealing with the absolute disconnection that is car culture. Work that is exploitative soul slavery. A planet kept in a state of perpetual war. Degraded food, degraded water, degraded air, degraded life. People aren't getting the basic nutrition they need - either because they do not have access to food or because the food they do have access to is genetically modified, chemical-ridden, or heavily processed.
In corporate capitalist society, people aren't trained to be healthy. They're trained to be unhealthy because they buy more that way.
There's only so much that can be done by the individual to maintain health within systems and structures that are inherently sick. Unless willing to look at the broader scenarios and the broader reasons why people are getting sick, we're just treating symptoms, not eradicating the illness.
Looking at the big picture like this scares people. They like to think their health is in their control, in their own hands, that it's their decisions and their decisions alone that determine their health or lack of it. This allows them to continue living without looking at the deeper causes of illness and pain on this planet. It keeps them from examining the roots, and it reinforces both their smugness and their ignorance about what is really going on.
There is a strong "survival of the fittest and most able-bodied" ethic in Western culture. There's a real desire to divide people into the healthy and the unhealthy, the winners and the losers. If you're too sick or have too much pain to work in the toxic mainstream workforce, you're often considered a low-life degenerate.
Often, the underlying idea is: if you're ill or in pain, you're doing something wrong. You're living wrong. Your thoughts are wrong. You're holding onto emotion. You have bad karma. You're genetically flawed. You're unenlightened.
This is a view of illness and injury created, reinforced, and furthered by the New Age paradigm, and it is one that's taken all the way to the bank.
With wounded healer Chiron transiting Pisces, though, it's plain to see how all this misses the point. Pisces deals with the whole, with the full, inter-related situation. Chiron in Pisces relates to the understanding of the whole in relation to sickness and pain in order to heal. On this planet at this time, more people are dealing with illness and pain - of one variety or another - than are not. If an individual is not dealing with it him or herself, a family member or close friend is. The idea of a mainstream society in tip-top, glowing health with a small minority of unfortunates who are ill and weak is just not reality. People in a state of optimal health are, in actuality, not the norm.
The truth is, each sick individual is part of a larger whole that is also sick. Sick individuals do not live in a vacuum - though the solipsistic "creating your own reality" meme would lead people to believe that. Sick people are symptomatic of sick human relations, sick cultures, sick environments, sick systems, sick power dynamics.
From a previous post: "The intense levels of psychic pain held at this point in human history, collectively left denied and unvoiced, truly have the potential to do us in. The psychic backwash drops over us in waves, often without warning, threatening to drag us under. The homeless, the alcoholics, the addicts, the mentally ill, the depressed, the prostituted, the murdered, the missing are symbols of this unaddressed psychic pain and the resulting dysfunction, symptomatic of deeper roots. They've done all they can, said all they can, and still most don't see the connections.
It seeps into suburbia, into condo buildings, into schools and offices, and still people won't put their fingers on it."
At this point in the game, heading out of the astrological Piscean era, most of us are the walking wounded - whether the wounds are visible or not. We're pretty much all playing hurt. The wounded Pisces themes, brought freshly into perspective at last February's Pisces New Moon conjunct Chiron, come to a point of illuminated culmination here.
The Sun entered Virgo August 22 and opposed Neptune in Pisces - the prime symbol of 'Pisces for the Aquarian era' - August 24. The Sun now moves to an opposition to Chiron at 7 degrees Pisces on August 30, leading into the Pisces Full Moon that night (exact August 31 at 7:58 a.m. CST).
Mercury enters Virgo in the evening of August 31, opposing Neptune in Pisces September 1 and Chiron in Pisces September 4. There is a strong theme of pinpointing, of applying Virgoan antiseptic sting, of removing fallacy and bloat and changing ideas around healing, health, service, and work.
As we gradually move out of the astrological Piscean era, we're entrusted with the responsibility of shifting consensus reality to something closer to the truth. At this time, with the influence of nitty gritty, reality-based Virgo opposing, the Piscean era denials, delusions, escapism, scapegoating, and smoke-and-mirrors effects can be removed with precision.
The pain and damage done during the Piscean era are still here to be resolved. Part of the resolution comes from a much more keen analysis than has previously been offered, with a more precise accounting of cause and effect.
As the Moon grows full over the next week and touches Chiron, we can pinpoint fallacies around health, illness, and pain that keep us divided into the healthy and the unhealthy on this planet. We can stretch out into a full, illuminated understanding of our shared responsibility for changing things.
Under the Aquarian era umbrella, illness, injury, disability, and pain do not have to separate us from the "normal" people and from mainstream society. (There really is no "normal" with Aquarius.) Under the Aquarian umbrella, these things do not define us, and they do not have to sentence us to lives of isolation. The pain and illness we endure living in these human bodies are not shameful secrets. They're badges of honour. And the way we heal from here is to bring it all into the fold, into the wide-open Pisces heart.
Enjoy this healing moon.
More on Chiron in Pisces
And it's from this perspective that people are able to bring forth some of their very, very best.
Some of the best writers, artists, activists, creatives, and people, period, on this planet live and have lived with illness and pain. They've worked under duress and wrested their contributions from the depths of despair and isolation. They've spoken from that very potent point at the edge between life and death, concentrated into the current moment by the withdrawal of the promise of a long and healthy life.
So Herophilus, your words certainly hold some of that Old Male Philosopher weight. They really do sound as if we should pay attention to them. But as per usual, the exalted and oft-quoted philosophical thinkers (mostly men) miss the real root truth.
Changing your diet, improving the water you drink, eating organic, exercising, spending time in nature, taking vitamins and supplements - these all help greatly. They're our responsibility. And as we move through a two-year Virgo-infused Mars cycle, refining and perfecting these things is a constant theme and focus.
But we're dealing with multi-layered and intentional attacks on our health and energetic systems on this planet. We're dealing with straw-that-breaks-the-camel's-back environmental pollution, electromagnetic pollution, psychic pollution, radioactivity. We're dealing with toxic corporate lifestyles packaged and sold to "the consumer." We're dealing with the absolute disconnection that is car culture. Work that is exploitative soul slavery. A planet kept in a state of perpetual war. Degraded food, degraded water, degraded air, degraded life. People aren't getting the basic nutrition they need - either because they do not have access to food or because the food they do have access to is genetically modified, chemical-ridden, or heavily processed.
In corporate capitalist society, people aren't trained to be healthy. They're trained to be unhealthy because they buy more that way.
There's only so much that can be done by the individual to maintain health within systems and structures that are inherently sick. Unless willing to look at the broader scenarios and the broader reasons why people are getting sick, we're just treating symptoms, not eradicating the illness.
Looking at the big picture like this scares people. They like to think their health is in their control, in their own hands, that it's their decisions and their decisions alone that determine their health or lack of it. This allows them to continue living without looking at the deeper causes of illness and pain on this planet. It keeps them from examining the roots, and it reinforces both their smugness and their ignorance about what is really going on.
There is a strong "survival of the fittest and most able-bodied" ethic in Western culture. There's a real desire to divide people into the healthy and the unhealthy, the winners and the losers. If you're too sick or have too much pain to work in the toxic mainstream workforce, you're often considered a low-life degenerate.
Often, the underlying idea is: if you're ill or in pain, you're doing something wrong. You're living wrong. Your thoughts are wrong. You're holding onto emotion. You have bad karma. You're genetically flawed. You're unenlightened.
This is a view of illness and injury created, reinforced, and furthered by the New Age paradigm, and it is one that's taken all the way to the bank.
With wounded healer Chiron transiting Pisces, though, it's plain to see how all this misses the point. Pisces deals with the whole, with the full, inter-related situation. Chiron in Pisces relates to the understanding of the whole in relation to sickness and pain in order to heal. On this planet at this time, more people are dealing with illness and pain - of one variety or another - than are not. If an individual is not dealing with it him or herself, a family member or close friend is. The idea of a mainstream society in tip-top, glowing health with a small minority of unfortunates who are ill and weak is just not reality. People in a state of optimal health are, in actuality, not the norm.
The truth is, each sick individual is part of a larger whole that is also sick. Sick individuals do not live in a vacuum - though the solipsistic "creating your own reality" meme would lead people to believe that. Sick people are symptomatic of sick human relations, sick cultures, sick environments, sick systems, sick power dynamics.
From a previous post: "The intense levels of psychic pain held at this point in human history, collectively left denied and unvoiced, truly have the potential to do us in. The psychic backwash drops over us in waves, often without warning, threatening to drag us under. The homeless, the alcoholics, the addicts, the mentally ill, the depressed, the prostituted, the murdered, the missing are symbols of this unaddressed psychic pain and the resulting dysfunction, symptomatic of deeper roots. They've done all they can, said all they can, and still most don't see the connections.
It seeps into suburbia, into condo buildings, into schools and offices, and still people won't put their fingers on it."
At this point in the game, heading out of the astrological Piscean era, most of us are the walking wounded - whether the wounds are visible or not. We're pretty much all playing hurt. The wounded Pisces themes, brought freshly into perspective at last February's Pisces New Moon conjunct Chiron, come to a point of illuminated culmination here.
The Sun entered Virgo August 22 and opposed Neptune in Pisces - the prime symbol of 'Pisces for the Aquarian era' - August 24. The Sun now moves to an opposition to Chiron at 7 degrees Pisces on August 30, leading into the Pisces Full Moon that night (exact August 31 at 7:58 a.m. CST).
Mercury enters Virgo in the evening of August 31, opposing Neptune in Pisces September 1 and Chiron in Pisces September 4. There is a strong theme of pinpointing, of applying Virgoan antiseptic sting, of removing fallacy and bloat and changing ideas around healing, health, service, and work.
As we gradually move out of the astrological Piscean era, we're entrusted with the responsibility of shifting consensus reality to something closer to the truth. At this time, with the influence of nitty gritty, reality-based Virgo opposing, the Piscean era denials, delusions, escapism, scapegoating, and smoke-and-mirrors effects can be removed with precision.
The pain and damage done during the Piscean era are still here to be resolved. Part of the resolution comes from a much more keen analysis than has previously been offered, with a more precise accounting of cause and effect.
As the Moon grows full over the next week and touches Chiron, we can pinpoint fallacies around health, illness, and pain that keep us divided into the healthy and the unhealthy on this planet. We can stretch out into a full, illuminated understanding of our shared responsibility for changing things.
Under the Aquarian era umbrella, illness, injury, disability, and pain do not have to separate us from the "normal" people and from mainstream society. (There really is no "normal" with Aquarius.) Under the Aquarian umbrella, these things do not define us, and they do not have to sentence us to lives of isolation. The pain and illness we endure living in these human bodies are not shameful secrets. They're badges of honour. And the way we heal from here is to bring it all into the fold, into the wide-open Pisces heart.
Enjoy this healing moon.
More on Chiron in Pisces
10 comments:
Wow. Amazing read
"People in a state of optimal health are, in actuality, not the norm."
Hehe but the petropharmesuctical commercials say we can get back to being our regular healthy selves. To them there is ALWAYS something wrong with us.
I agree about if you dont have your health you have nothing meme is really played out. How about, If you let mad scientists play with with our food- we wont have nothing. Thats aquarian era meme right there. :)
Ive been doing the skip a meal to eat real. With these prices I have to.. I think its better than have every meal while making a deal, with monsanto.
Your Astro perspectives are so good willow im just gonna make you my internet start up page. Why should apple get all the hits.. really.
“Often, the underlying idea is: if you're ill or in pain, you're doing something wrong. You're living wrong. Your thoughts are wrong. You're holding onto emotion. You have bad karma. You're genetically flawed. You're unenlightened.”
. . . or in my uber-rigid part of the USA: “Obviously, God does not love you.” This is what I wrote on 4/25/13 in the plush waiting room of a doctor I was to see after my stroke on 3/13/13 and broken hip on 4/13/13:
Alone, afraid, broken.
“Is that all you’ve got?”
Smug, self-satisfied stares
of the affluent, and not
All that rich either.
Enough to feel better than
the great Unwashed,
Smelling of cigarettes
and poverty.
“How dare they enter
my world which is
Above all wholesome,
Not dirty and dark, full
of dis-ease and misery.
I am better than this
human refuse and
I will watch the last
of them die of debt,
starvation and illness,
From behind the walls
of my gated community.
I could help them but my
God has put them under me
So I will know He loves me
More.”
Thank you, Willow, for always saying what needs to be said.
Thanks for sharing, Willow. I appreciate your attitude about how chronic illness can be a badge of honor. I have survived cancer twice, and know I am a more whole and complete person despite some internal missing parts.
You are very inspiring. I'd vote for you if you ever ran for office, but you are too smart and truthful to make it in politics.
Blessings from Olympia, WA, my friend.
Thanks for this repost. Having lived with a neurological illness that has had a profound impact on my life your words ring true and clear. I learned this year that while my mother was pregnant with me she was living at Camp Lejeune Naval Base drinking highly contaminated water.
I am a yoga teacher and have had to continually deal with people misunderstanding what the illness I live with means and blaming me for having it. The individualistic fix doesn't cut it anymore folks. We are in this together and if you want to talk about karma, let's talk about collective karma, and let's talk about collective solutions.
This is a great post and one that I wish would be widely read. Nice work.
Thanks for your beautiful comments, guys! I hope this Moon was a healing one for you.
"The individualistic fix doesn't cut it anymore folks. We are in this together and if you want to talk about karma, let's talk about collective karma, and let's talk about collective solutions."
Exactly, Anon 6:49. Collective karma is the concept people need to understand, especially now. Thanks for your comment.
This is a beautiful post. My aunt was poisoned by Levaquin, and is slowly recovering. I was also poisoned by conventional medicine and a misdiagnosis. I was lucky to catch the "wrongness" of what was happening to me early enough to be able to recover my strength. I truly appreciate your words on sickness/health. We simply get it so wrong in the contemporary West.
Looking at Asteroid Hygeia's transits and the position in my natal was illuminating for me. Thank you for your work, Willow!
"The individualistic fix doesn't cut it anymore folks. We are in this together and if you want to talk about karma, let's talk about collective karma, and let's talk about collective solutions."
Sounds like, the end of the Piscean Era focus on Saviors and Victims, those roles being individual and distinct identities. Sounds like the early moments of the Aquarian Age of a focus on the collective. How do we work effectively in a group? communicate in a group? think, feel or even grow in a group? What will likely be cast in the shadows of the Aquarian Age? Leonine pride, performance, personal romance? Should we be mindful of the potential for 'tyranny of the group'
Interesting reflections to make. Thanks all for the interesting comments.
I agree about the stupid health statement. I've always hated that saying! We're all not ever in "perfect" health or near it! Our systems are fluid, fluctuating from moment to moment, month to month, year to year. It's a process of trying to maintain our homeostasis.
I'm an RN and I despise Western medicine. I use it as little as possible and w/ fear/trepidation/paranoia perhaps. I've seen and know too much. And, I'm a person who researches a lot so the medical "norm" squad hates me!
I like your writing style and scopes!
News from the US: the Monsanto Protection Act is up for renewal but a big call-your-senator campaign, and other grassroots efforts might keep it off the table. If anybody is so inclined, this is a good time to phone up your senator.
Of course, there's new GMO protections being introduced all the time (like Repub. Bill Upton's bill to prevent states from labelling GMOs). If only we could use Round-Up on Big Pharma!
Willow, it was healing just reading your article. It is overwhelming to think about the big picture. But as a collective, we're in the game.
Just a silly local example: an organic neighborhood garden group is growing fruit in large containers, for us city folks that don't have a lot of space. Our t-shirt campaign: " We will Berry you!" (graphic is an upraised fist holding blueberries).
Hey, you gotta start somewhere. ;) Thanks for the inspiration, Willow!
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