New Moon in Virgo: Impossible Tasks
New Moon in Virgo
Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 6:39 pm PDT/9:39 pm EDT
Fairy tales and myths are full of seemingly impossible tasks. In the original Cinderella, she has to separate lentils and rice from the ashes, Hercules is given twelve labors, and Psyche must complete three such tasks to be united with Eros including making a journey to the underworld. Each of these is symbolic of transforming a place where we feel stuck into an opportunity…seemingly spinning straw into gold. Though we often don’t recognize it at the time our lives are full of such moments. Moments where the road in front of us seems impossible to traverse and yet the pathway mysteriously opens. But only after we take a few small steps.
The act of stepping forward is essentially what allows the magic to appear.
Virgo asks us to attend to the details that in the end help us accomplish the seemingly impossible task. The daily tasks that make up our lives, small steps forward that we take that ultimately lead us to a much broader world than where we began. Often creating something much larger than we imagined when our feet first hit the path.
This is how we separate the chaff from the grain, another Virgoian task, by doing the work of the small details. These small steps, our daily tasks, don’t seem very glamorous until you realize that if you are driving cross country from California to the East Coast and simply adjust your trajectory by three degrees when you begin those tiny degrees are the difference between arriving in Florida or New York.
A Virgo New Moon invites us to attend to the details. To separate the chaff from the grain keeping only what nourishes us.
Yesterday a friend of mine posted a story on FB about a man whose first book was published to great acclaim at 98 (after being turned down multiple times at various publishing houses) after he turned to writing when his wife of 67 years died at 93. He wrote and published two more prior to his death at 101 and he called his 90’s the most productive years of his life. One of the comments caught my eye. Basically, the commenter stated that he had the advantage of not having to hold down a job or be distracted by a partner.
This is one of the lies we tell ourselves to justify the work we aren’t doing but say we yearn to do because we are too afraid to try. And we disguise the fear under the guise of busyness and so-called adulthood and abandon our dreams. When we do this we treat the very things that potentially give our soul life as though an all-or-nothing proposition at best or an afterthought at worst.
And I admit I am on a bit of a soapbox here because I have worked with blocked artists for over 30 years as well as dealing ongoingly with my own blocks. Julia Cameron creator of the original workshop and the seminal book The Artist’s Way writes three pages a day with each book she writes. As she points out over a 90-day period that adds up to 270 pages. Best-selling author John Grisham was a lawyer with a family to support. He would get to the office at 5 a.m. to give himself time to write prior to starting his work day. Hemingway wrote 500 words a day. This blog is nearly two times longer than that.
Whether you desire to be an artist, writer, singer, go back to college and get a degree, get back in shape or run a marathon all of it is contingent upon you showing up to do the work. One word at a time, one brushstroke at a time, one step at a time. This is Virgo’s superpower. The spiritual practice of consistently showing up no matter how messy the circumstances.
At the very least we can all find 15 minutes a couple of times a week to start. It isn’t all or nothing, it is cultivating the habit of showing up for yourself and then doing it again.
What can I say, this is chop wood and carry water kind of Moon. And that is a superpower.
Virgo sorts. It filters what is of use from what is not(Chaff from the grain) and then assimilates what is of use into its life. Virgo asks us to choose and focus. Then we let the chaff fall away. It is amazing how much energy we can give to not living our dreams.
This New Moon in Virgo offers us an opportunity to choose and begin again…to sort out what is our priority, what is most important to us, and then to show up and do the work, to apprentice ourselves to our values and priorities.
Virgo is associated with the Magician card in the tarot. It is connected with manifestation, with harvesting what we first planted as seeds and then nourished into growth with our actions. But to truly create the conditions for manifestation we have to take conscious steps in the physical world toward the circumstances we desire. And we do that by showing up and attending to the details, moment by moment, day by day.
When we show up the universe meets us more than halfway through synchronicities beyond our imagining. This is the true secret of spinning straw into gold.
