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Finding Ease in Struggle: Virgo
Greetings from the tail end of summer. The sun’s heat this week has warranted closed doors and windows here in Sonoma County, CA, but fall is certainly beckoning, with harvest fruits abounding, and squashes now in the markets. Hard to believe, but the equinox is at hand, occurring the day after the Sept. 21 (PST) second Virgo New Moon in a row. At this moment we are half way through the seasonal and zodiacal cycles, and those of us in the north preparing for the darkening time.
This New Moon will be the second of two eclipses in the cycle, with a partial solar eclipse. (The recent Pisces Full Moon included a lunar eclipse.) The first Virgo New Moon happened a month ago, at 0° Virgo, and this next one will be at 29°, the ‘anaretic’ degree, of completion at the end of a cycle, sometimes invoking a sense of urgency or crisis at the brink of transition. Eclipses as well quicken the energy, beyond the already heightened dark or full moon energies; and they, too, often mark a major turning point, depending on how they hit your own chart. Typically, they signify endings and new beginnings.
Given all this, this past month of Virgo archetype energy, with two New Moon imprints, and an eclipse series, has been exceedingly Virgoan—manifesting through both the shadows and gifts of the sign. This makes sense, given that the South Node is in Virgo, reflecting that we are already about the South Node work of ‘draining the swamp’ of our off-centered Virgo approaches (too much serving, worrying, and workaholism), and needing to claim the higher ones (staying masterfully and easefully on task, and knowing when to rest and integrate).
In addition to the extra Virgo emphasis indicated by having two New Moons in the sign and one being a solar eclipse, it’s also noteworthy that each of these New Moon charts includes strong quincunx aspects. I rarely discuss quincunxes (not for the faint of heart!), but in Virgo season, I will venture in, as they are relevant.
Between a rock and a hard place
A quincunx is a 150° angle between two planets that poses a challenge or difficulty, not unlike the Virgo archetype, one hard to resolve! Mercury-ruled Virgo, while an Earth sign, tends to live much of the time in its head, analyzing and chewing on problems. (“Figuring out…” as my Aries husband always used to observe in me, with my Virgo Sun.) Each of the two signs involved in a quincunx is both a different element and modality (these being cardinal, fixed, and mutable.) So, for instance, Aries-to-Virgo is a quincunx angle; and Aries is cardinal fire, while Virgo is mutable earth. Being of different intent, the two don’t easily find a working groove (my mate and I did prevail for 17 years together, though!)
Virgo, set to the work of integration and healing, as well as service, is in itself a sign of ‘crisis’—of tackling tasks or problems not easily solved, often overly consumed with a need to perfect (which is technically not what life on earth is about!), and thereby prone to a stressed nervous system. The opening quincunx (the 150° angle created between 0° Aries and 0° Virgo) invokes the Virgo plight. The closing quincunx marks the 150° angle from 0° Scorpio back to 0° Aries, and also describes stress, indicating the Scorpionic need to dig deep into dark waters, often exposing old wounds. Both types of qunicunxes call forth what feels unresolvable. However, both impulses are ultimately geared towards healing—Virgo by sorting through the dross and purifying, and Scorpio, through purging and regenerating.
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Finger of fate
The Aug. 22 New Moon included quincunxes from the Saturn-Neptune conjunction to the Sun-Moon conjunction in Virgo. Forming a Yod, or “Finger of Fate” triangle, Pluto at 1° Aquarius also quincunxed this New Moon. So, we had both Pluto and Neptune ‘pointing’ at the Virgo Sun-Moon, with these two outer planets in harmonious sextile. Two quincunxes joined by a sextile creates the Yod. The Yod can indicate a special, albeit difficult, destiny or calling. (Apologies if this is a bit too much analytical Virgo detail. If this is not for you, narrative lies ahead!)
This first New Moon configuration has called us to the work of grounding (Saturn) our dreams (Neptune), and allowing in our intent to transform by adopting new ways of being and thinking (Pluto in Aquarius), while accepting the limits and struggles involved in doing so. Neptune and Pluto in tight sextile call us to surrender, to trust that we are held in grace, as we ourselves do not, in the end make things happen! (But both Virgo and Scorpio fall off-center when they become over-determined to control outcomes with excessive hard work, or manipulation.)
While the August Virgo New Moon didn’t involve an eclipse, with its quincunxes it further injected a note of Virgo ‘burdening’, inspiring us to work extra hard for things, perhaps burn ourselves out, and hopefully teach us that we need to ease up on ourselves, slow down, and trust. Holding our intentions and dreams and ‘letting go’ is every bit as important as perfecting and disciplining our actions.
This is where the Pisces Full Moon Lunar eclipse stepped in, reminding us of the need to include the Pisces polarity partner with whom Virgo shares the impulse for service and the striving after perfection. Neptune-ruled Pisces offers us a much-needed shot of bliss, or faith that we are part of the divine fabric weaving through all things, in between all of Virgo’s busy doings.
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Surrendering best laid plans
One manifestation of the Pisces Full Moon can involve the experience of one’s longing for perfection being dashed, of dreams of a divinely charged experience met with disillusionment. And/or, there can be an opening to an infusion of ‘teachings’, or beams of wisdom, filtering through into mundane and difficult reality. I experienced both of these on my recent eight-day trip to the Sierra mountains while sharing a tent cabin with an old friend at a Lakes Basin area ‘resort’—glamping, it must be said, is still loads of work!.
My photos surely reflect the divine part of the adventure, but my lived emotional experience during several of the days was one of deep frustration and disappointment—a perfect Pisces-Virgo storm. The ultimate understanding I eventually claimed, was of the need to accept (Pisces), to drop below the mind and into the heart’s somatic coherence, and thereby be released from Virgo’s perseverating mental prison.
I’d stayed at this idyllically positioned Sierra mountain lake resort the prior year, and visited the area many times. So, I had learned it was not without its challenges (as experiences at high energy spots can be); but this year the level of trials reached unprecedented heights (or depths), with difficulties arising perhaps perfectly crafted to touch my most tender pain points.
Not even knowing there was a tent cabin situated in the woods, we arrived to find we were assigned to this darkest cabin on the grounds—one whose outdoor area was in the trees and faced some unremarkable shrubs, not the heavenly, sunlit golden meadow enclosed by soaring rocky terrain that we (and most of the other cabins) had close proximity to last year. While previously I had enjoyed timeless morning hours soaking in the sun’s sweet rays with uplifting views just outside our cabin, this year to catch any direct morning light required moving our chairs every 10 minutes, with views of the public path to the bathhouse that other campers travelled. This time, the ideal of quiet, sun-blessed seclusion was not to be.
The second night my sleep had been disturbed by my friend, who’d been awakened by heavy winds and gotten up. Having a restless sleep after that, I’d really needed a coffee lift that morning. Instead, we awoke to a power outage. We settled for a green tea bag in some lukewarm faucet water from the bathroom. Thankfully, we later discovered that the staff down at the main lodge (a 5-minute walk) had a propane camp stove that we could use, so we did in the end walk down the hill and boil some water, and I was able to cook my cereal grains that I’d soaked overnight, while looking out over the lovely lake. If I hadn’t already been disgruntled about the darkness of the cabin and the noise of neighbors (see below), I might have been fine! But everything at this point had tipped decidedly glass-half-empty (hello Virgo).
The third day I awoke with a cold or virus that had me feeling unwell for several more days. (I hadn’t been sick since I’d had Covid in 2022.) And the weather shifted, ushering in mostly cloudy skies for the next several days—two of which included rain showers. The temperatures dropped dramatically and unseasonably, and we wore all our layers, topped with down jackets, gloves, and hats most of the time, except when hiking or at mid-day.
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Unchill Virgo
Perhaps the greatest hardship of all—for my overly sensitive nervous system, invoking a ‘crisis’ inside—was the level of noise I had to navigate. Last year we’d not had neighbors sharing the back side of our cabin (we’d lucked out), but this year we shared the wall at the head of our beds with a couple on the other side, one of them a man with a very loud carrying voice, which he enjoyed using! With lots of gaps in the cabin walls, I could hear their every move and utterance. The second two nights I was awakened when they rose together at 3am, shuffled about, and talked for endless long minutes. The second of those nights I stayed awake for the next 3 hours. Here we have ‘unchill’, hypervigilant Virgo at work!
My cabinmate, who has always lived in the city, and currently lives beneath two people on the floor above her, was not disturbed by the noise, well-trained as she is at filtering out voices and movements. This was my own private hell, or Virgo crisis, which made it worse, as I felt the familiar Virgo self-critique over the fact that I was unhappy in the first place.
Further, there was a family of 5 (with three adult children) at the only other cabin near us, and it turned out the couple on the other side of our wall were friends with them, as well as another couple in another cabin. At various times in the early days of the week when it was still somewhat warm they gathered in numbers of 7 or more at the outdoor table beside their cabin (within easy earshot of our picnic table) talking, laughing, sharing stories for several hours either in the morning, or over dinner, distracting me from being able to read or tune into the song of the wind in the trees.
On the first cold night all 9 of them packed into the cabin of the couple behind our wall for dinner. It was so loud we resorted to playing music off my phone to somewhat drown them out. In the end, not all bad, as my friend and I played cards and danced, meeting fun with fun! But using my phone was not why I’d come to the mountains.
One of the parts that felt particularly ‘lower octave’ Virgo to me about all this was that, given that I could only rarely access the Piscean bliss field I’d hope to find, the constant tasks of preparing meals, keeping the cabin orderly, using a bathroom and outdoor dish washing station—a 2-minute walk away—and building and tending wood stove fires at night and in the mornings became just too much mundane work! All work and no bliss, I complained!
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Balm of acceptance
However, I did later benefit from my deep reflections about all this, and came to an understanding that this was a type of purification or even initiation I was being put through. This makes sense astrologically, given that the Pisces Full Moon opposition to the Sun was closely sandwiching my Virgo Sun. Through it I came to see that facing my self-imposed—one could say, attitudinal—suffering, which I could not will away or control, required an act of Piscean surrender, and of letting go of focusing on the negative. Indeed, here were my old, bad Virgo habits coming to bite me, and my peace of mind. Let’s reach completion with this one!
In truth, the experience those first days had been laced with moments of nature’s grace. Virgo focuses on ‘what’s missing’ with the intent to perfect, but Pisces ‘lets go and lets God.’
My first few nights there, I saw the moon rise over the dark lake, with her honey gold light reflected. I wrote: Announcing herself through the trees, calling me down towards the lake to witness, was the golden orb—shocking, alive, peeking first above the horizon, then over a cloud, Illuminator laying reflections down on the lake waters, moonlit gold watercolor splashes outlined by tall firs tracing dark vertical frames. The image resembled three upside-down, gold-stained church windows.
This, while the majestic moon herself rose slowly through the sky, etched across sideways by pink-peach swaths of spun cloud cotton. I was struck by the contrast of the lake’s reflection of vertical shapes, and the moon’s horizontal weaving. Verticality to me signals the connection with the divine (Pisces), and horizontality, the realm of the mundane (Virgo). The cross we bear, I thought, plainly felt at this Vigo-Pisces moment.
Virgo’s humble devotion calls us to bear the slings of the living realm, while contemplating the divine, even while often dimly felt, if at all. Likely, I am not alone in having experienced such horizontal plane disturbances and disruptions during these past weeks, with all the Virgo signatures at hand! But, I got to see the golden church windows in the lake! What has been your comparable silver, or golden, lining these past weeks, I wonder—your learning or gifts?
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Mountain highs
There were indeed many immersive ‘highs’ during my week, moments uplifted by the winds rush through tall trees; gently lapping lake waters; the mesmerizing movement of clouds light and dark; the sun’s pure light when it shone—once unexpectedly on a gray day while I picnicked beside a waterfall pool, just before the clouds moved back in and opened up with rain; and the awe-inspiring glimpses of the Sierra Buttes.
Our first day’s slow, but steep hike up to Deer Lake had been touched with grace, albeit the hint of changeability ahead. I wrote: The hushed presence of Him/Her through the firs and pines to my left, the great Buttes rising behind. The ripple of diamond-sheen, blown-across lake waters—such deep peace and joy these impart. A feeling of foreverness one wants to hold and keep. But then it passes—the sun dips through haze, or darts behind a tree. The wind picks up—invoking cold, the need to move. One cannot stay long in the bliss. Disturbance, shift, ever at the wing. So hard to adjust at times, so easy (like improv) at others.
This has been a lasting takeway, the need to be willing to continually adjust to a rapidly shifting, and inconveniencing world! Blessedly, by week’s end I felt I had somehow ‘sloughed off’ that burdened, over-pressured Virgo feeling, and achieved a state of deep calm. It didn’t hurt that our talkative, back wall neighbors left after the 5th night, leaving us to dine, sleep, and wake in peace for our final two days. (Perhaps an angel did in the end have mercy on me, and arrange things as such!)
Ultimately, I feel received the blessing of a deep training for the way forward, through the next six months during which the Virgo eclipse signatures will continue to reverberate and call us to the work of modifying our over-fixations on ‘how it should be’ and our self-imposed pressures and anxieties, calling us to patience, self-compassion, and the gift of letting go into simplicity – the intergration of Piscean knowing, with Virgo practicality.
I have taken up all my cyberspace this month with my own ruminations, and uncharacteristically not pointed outside to any archetypal manifestations of the Virgo theme! However, I will share one excellent piece from contemplative Franciscan Richard Rohr’s newsletter, on The Heresy of Perfection, which is a beautiful treatise on the over-striving for the perfect, and the importance of humility, and the path of ‘littleness’ that is the Virgo way.
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September 21 Solar Eclipse
The chart for Sunday’s New Moon Eclipse indicates some potential relief, along with the predictable Virgo challenges, cutting an amazingly balanced shape—fitting given that the same shape is present the next day, when the Sun ingresses into Venus-ruled, harmony-guided Libra, marking the fall equinox—a moment of balanced light and dark. Archetypally, we have now completed the first six-months project of forming, refining and integrating a ‘self.’ Next, we prepare to relate (Libra, Scorpio) and find our place in community (Sag, Capricorn, Aquarius).
This New Moon chart, like that of the August Full Moon, includes a prominent “kite” formation, with the top point of the kite formed by the mini-triangle aspect made between the three outer planets, Pluto-Uranus-Neptune. This triangle, which I’d referred to in my Cancer blog as a magic triangle will be with us to greater and lesser degrees until 2028, but its tightest orbs have been happening these past two months. While trines and sextiles indicate ease and helpfulness between the players, triangles like this, particularly the much more common Grand Trine (an equilateral triangle comprised of three trines) tends not to get much done, as some sort of tension in the form of opposition or square is needed as an activating yeast.
Well, with the kite—which combines both ease and challenge, and thereby indicates the potential to manifest latent gifts—we have some yeast! This New Moon eclipse in Virgo directly opposes the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, forming the spine of the kite, indicating a challenge to ‘continue working at’ this powerful Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries signature, particularly in our relating (oppositions being about what we meet outside ourselves). Such relating can pertain to our relationship with our innermost selves. Neptune opposing both Sun and Moon can bring up confusion, distortion, or delusion, so we are asked to take responsibility for our behaviors and rigidities (Saturn), as well as use our inner truth barometer by leaning into the Virgo gift of discernment.
The chart also has two squares, adding inner tension to the mix. Mars in Libra squares Pluto in Aquarius, and Venus in Virgo squares Uranus in Gemini. Mars in Libra reiterates the relational theme, given that Libra is about one-on-one relating. While its desire is harmony, and it excels when it listens and shares in equal amounts, it devolves to Martian fieriness when off-centered. Mars in square to intense Pluto suggests frustration and possible blow-ups over issues of fairness. We have the opportunity here, though, to access the Air element energies of Libra and Aquarius, which help us stay cool. Using the breath to return us to alignment when aroused is one of the gifts of this element.
Meanwhile, relational Venus (ruler of Libra) squaring Uranus indicates unpredictability in our relating don’t be surprised if they’re here today, and elsewhere tomorrow! Excitement, surprise and stimulus in our connections are to be expected—if not long-lasting—along with insights, and delight.
To boot, we have another yod (the two thin green lines) pointing to Saturn-Neptune, as we did in the August Virgo New Moon chart, this one with a sextile between Mars and Venus at the base.
In the end, most important is the spotlighting of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction with this solar eclipse, and the Virgo-Pisces opposition of the recent lunar eclipse—both indicating a need to release those patterns of being and mind that no longer serve us, or others. We are helped in this by remembering to simplify, and choose ease and flow as we move through time and space.
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This is particularly important as Saturn has recently begun its last Rx back into Pisces, calling for a final consideration of how we want to engage with the watery archetype of intuitive gestating and unknowing, of confusion and creativity. This, too, indicates a significant completion of a cycle, of Saturn’s 30-year journey through the signs, now doing its final reckoning. When it returns to Aries in February, Saturn will shortly thereafter conjunct Neptune at 0° Aries, in effect starting a new relationship with Pisces’ ruler.
By then, after a winter of reflection, we need to be ready to take real action, if we haven’t started already, through a renewed version of ourselves, out in the world, yet in a way that is infused with our intimations from the inner world, and from other worlds—from the vast realm of Neptune. With Saturn we are called to allow our old habits and structures to become infused with new imaginal intimations.
Anything goes, and the more it goes, the better! As I’ve said before, the future is seeded in our creative imaginings (not in the news!). Anything we can do to help us drop below the mind, into the interconnected body-being part of us, serves this purifying, cleansing intent of Virgo. Blessed be in the endeavor!