If you’re feeling the way you normally do one minute before your period starts, or-for the menstrually un-endowed–the way you might after swilling a bottle of wine and watching tiny puppies hug tiny kittens right after listening to Trump’s State of the Union—then you are right on course. Because Pisces is all about feeling every feeling at once—feeling the entire universe at once—and this full moon, also known as the Corn Moon, is here for a big-kahuna emotional release. Happily, it’s happening in Virgo season, which can ground you as even as you collapse into a pile of tears, snot, and (if we’re lucky) more delightful bodily fluids. Even better? This full moon is happy to banish all that stands between you and your creative manifestation. Questions to ask: “Where do I land on the idealism-pragmatism spectrum, and how should I adjust that? How can I reshape my victim mentality (which we’ve all got in some area of our life) into compassion for myself and others?” Sounds like a lot of tasks? Well, babies, this full moon is going to be a lot anyway so you may as well lean in with some Virgo hard work. Just remember: Any ritual tonight should begin with an agreement to open to the loving energies that flow within and around you.
Archive | Country Matters
The Feast and Famine of Being Green
Lumet’s Emerald City (lit by Oswald Morris; costume-designed by Norma Kamali).
It’s 7:30 am Sunday morning, and I’ve been up for hours.
That I rose before dawn is not uncharacteristic. But I’d planned to sleep in this morning. To bask in a morning of quiet stillness, quiet comfort after returning from a wonderful week alone in the woods of Columbia County and jumping head-long into the clamor of New York.
I spent so much of this busy weekend activated by the presence of others—in sessions with clients, then walking and dining and bedding my beau—that today I was pulled out of sleep hours before dawn, the need to process my interactions more powerful than my need for rest.
Mae Sarton has a wonderful passage in Journal of a Solitude about shutting the door to the world.
Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…
I find that last line less ironic than simply factual. Because I do not just absorb other people’s realities. They absorb me. For me to spend time in the presence of anyone is to climb inside them, so that I am regarding the world through their senses, processing information through their nerve-endings and brain synapses. Continue Reading →
Astro PSA: Virgo Season in a Pandemic
Isn’t it funny that Virgo season begins at the end of August, when most of us are at our absolute laziest? In fact, I’ve been so lazy that just crafting this post felt like more exertion than I could handle. But that’s exactly why we need this sign.
The hardest worker in the zodiac, Virgo can kick us into gear even when temperatures soar into the 90s and we’re in Month 6 of a pandemic. As a mutable sign, she’s hardly the OCD queen some claim her to be. It’s just that she understands Goddess is in the details, and that straight-ahead service and solicitude is at the backbone of every calling. Truly, she is the finest healer we have and admirably modest no matter how fabulous she may be. After the radical recharging—dare I say self-indulgence?—of Leo season, only the Maiden’s focus and fortitude can keep us fighting the good fight.
So I spent the day writing this, then cleaning up links and language on rubyintuition.com, and if that isn’t Virgo season work I don’t know what is. Because this sign isn’t about big, showy actions so much as the background business that is necessary to keep the world running smoothly. Virgo is the nurse of the zodiac, and we all know the best healers in hospitals are the nurses, not the rockstar surgeons. 
(Sorry, Meredith Grey.) Virgos attend to the smallest details to achieve the biggest changes. That’s why during this Virgo season we must register everyone to vote, inspect every polling booth, and nitpick at every official–not to mention the US postal service itself–to lay the necessary foundation for a fair election come Scorpio season. The ultimate Virgo message: Think globally, act locally.
To refocus, recalibrate, and rev back into your own best service, book a reading; ‘tis the season! (Pictured in this video: Virgos—some admittedly controversial—whose labors of love have changed our lives.