Super Moon in Capricorn

One day late, but I’ve been in the flow of experiencing this Moon for myself. As a Scorpio, I feel this one strongly since the Moon in Capricorn floats very close to Pluto, ruler of Scorpio. Capricorn has been getting to know the coldest and darkest of the planets, or the little dwarf planet Pluto—dwarf maybe but immensely powerful in its potency and symbolism—for many years. Pluto takes a long time to orbit through a single sign, typically a decade or more, and the planet of shadowlands and transformation into light is coming to the end of its reign in Capricorn in the next few years so the sign of the goat-fish and conscious creation is coming to the very brink, too, and this Full Moon is about flash-triggering an integration of Pluto’s lessons.

Though the two signs are sextile, or apparently understanding of each other, the ethos of Scorpio, that is Pluto, and the sign of Capricorn have some stark difference. Pluto is about facing the chaos of the unknown with an open, vulnerable heart and letting the fires of emotions seethe through you which can completely upset or turn on its head any long-terms plans. But Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, is the ethos that put those long-term plans into motion in the first place. There can be some bitterness on the side of Capricorn, the last of the earth signs, and the most stodgy, difficult, stubborn, and powerful of them all. There is no lick of permanence or semblance of lasting without Capricorn’s fantastic threshold for delaying gratification and applying dogged determination. But the dry and prosaic plans of the Capricorn need Pluto’s wild licking and beating to become strong enough to actually weather the winds of time. Pluto is the testing element through which Capricorn must pass to make a life that is really flexible enough to be tossed without getting uprooted. Through the winds of Pluto is where one cyclically changes from being repressed and triggered to calm and emotionally responsive.

In the case of the Full Moon that just passed last night, whose penumbra of influence we are still very much under, emotions impossible to reign in, epiphanies that break through and break under the mounting pressure of an overly materialistic what you see is what you get world is a sign that Pluto is gaining headway over Saturn’s dominion. The Capricorn Full Moon always occurs in summer, in the realm of Cancer, its opposite sign, whereas the soft hearkening of the Cancer Full Moon occurs in the raw frigidness of the Capricorn time of year, December or January. But in mid-summer we get this slap in the face of what’s working or not, and what we truly want down to our guts, and the sunlight we’re absorbing and turning into energy must get directed into something that can be of good longterm use to us. The seriousness of what began perhaps as flighty and playful feelings in Gemini enters the sacred realm of the heart by July, Cancer time, when familial, ancestral, and inherited tendencies and ethics enter the picture. Whether something works in the paradigm of the structures we value is the potent and ruthless question Capricorn asks. But the overly villianized sign of Saturn, the old curmudgeon who eats his children, is asking these questions for a reason, because behind the desire to create and maintain a structure and atmosphere of safety and protection is a latent desire to allow free reign of the heart. Sweet vulnerability needs somewhere hidden and safe to unfold—that’s the unspoken dream, and the inspiration behind Capricorn’s tight-lipped and rigid ethos. But Pluto’s hand in this age-old battle is to strike down the walls so that the hidden heart lies for a time in the real winds of the wild, unprotected, and there is nothing Saturn can do about it but take a deep breath and learn.

We can’t hide our true feelings at such a moon or protect one another from our own demons or each other’s forever. It is a time of allowing much to be. Of having hard discussions—till tears and screaming erupt. That’s the sign that we’re beginning to integrate. That there is nowhere to feel truly safe, or hidden from yourself or your deep feelings. One must face them in the naked night of the summertime Full Moon. Allowance without judgement; listening without fear. Some of us might be at a place where we really have to direct our feelings to someone. For me, the feelings I had coming up at this time, which at some other time and place I might have unloaded in a torrent on my partner, I picked up and took outside with myself, and breathed a lot out into the night. Course, weed helps me, and fireflies blinking like thousands of ships coming into port. There’s no running from the epiphanies that come from recognizing these feelings either, or of what needs to be done next, and that is where the importance of Capricorn creeps back in.

Pluto ignites loss and emptiness before every new stage just as cleaning one’s house is necessary before having guests over. I encountered a poem of Rumi’s today, which said that one must consider emotions from meanness to tenderness, from rage to wordless sorrow, as guests all coming into our sacred house, or our bodies. They come all from beyond, and so always with reason, and their effect is for the good. To recognize the reason and even the structure that underlies uninhibited, chaotic seeming emotion is part of the lesson of Capricorn, to learn to honor the link between stability and being transparent and vulnerable. Every visitor or emotion must be invited with respect, for their purpose is to clear channels through which the heart can move. Such channels can get clogged up by many things—grief, heartbreak, self-hurt, abuse, old trauma. And without the visitors of rage, or great sorrow, we never unclog or unstick these places—in fact we just step over and around our wounds then, cyclically triggering them, as a broken finger detects a change of weather in a rainy spring. And Capricorn, the sign of suck it up and keep going anyway, has been tasked, because of Pluto’s presence, with actually healing the deep wounds. That process involves embracing the chaotic and the unstructurable so as to let the air move through and clear where one’s been hurt. Doing that eventually leads one back to the original plans but with renewed vigor— so as to this time create homes not like quiet cells to house our hearts in glass boxes, but homes, structures, and communities in which people can actually live, will want to live, where they will feel free, can be vulnerable again, be wild, and protected in their unprotectedness. There’s no point to keeping it all together if we’re hiding all kinds of sore wounds and the visitors that mark us out as living souls are not welcome— transparent love or transparent hate, tears and laughter. The harder stuff, like hatred or shame or pain, whatever it is, it dissipates if it’s welcome in and gently looked at; it comes ushering along in its belly secrets of importance—all the good feeling stuff twisted and digested wrong, triggered by this and that which maps a story of your life, which connects the pieces, makes you see origins, shift blame, reclaim innocence. If we invite all in and the house still stands, then it will continue to stand. And if it falls, why—then you’ll be rebuilding something better. There’s no sign that’s better about cutting losses and picking up the pieces than Capricorn, or Scorpio, for that matter. And on that, with mutual respect, these signs understand one another.

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Wisdom is Born of Emotional Trauma