Flow—New Moon in Pisces—February 20th.
So, this is how you swim inward. So, this is how you flow outwards. So, this is how you pray―Mary Oliver.
The new Moon in Pisces foreshadows Saturn’s long-distance swim through Pisces which begins on March 7th.
Pisces is the last, world-weary sign of the zodiac. This new Moon alludes to poignant endings and tentative new beginnings as we acknowledge our longing for something deeper, as we begin to weave new dreams, as we begin to tend to those places in our heart that know only Love.
Pisces is not an easy constellation to see with the naked eye. And in our birth chart, Pisces planets or the house with Pisces on the cusp, may be concealed by louder or more overtly visible planetary archetypes. A rumbustious Aries Sun or dutiful Capricorn Moon may be more comfortable in a world where we compare, compete, and have a “nice day”. Julia Cameron, writes, “The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.” We may hesitate at the water’s edge, admiring other people’s creativity, their altruism, their faith. We may disown our Pisces planets as the outer world presses its concerns into the sanctum of our intuition. We may not notice the signs and the symbols and pack away our childish magical thinking and innocent imaginings.
Pisces is where we journey to those soulful regions of our psyche, those places where we encounter mysterious daimons, and where powerful currents of emotion surge like a riptide, shattering our peace, bringing us to our knees. In this underwater realm, we hear the songs of whales, the whisper of sea grasses, the prayers of ancestors who lie full fathom five.
For those of us who like our lives anchored by certainty, the world may seem a precarious place right now. The Full Moon T-square Uranus on February 5th symbolised the devastating earthquake that ripped across Turkey and Syria the next day, leaving thousands still missing and the dead entombed by the rubble of defective housing. In New Zealand, people are just beginning to assess the damage of Cyclone Gabrielle as they wade through what remains of sodden homes and businesses. Still the ache of the war in Ukraine reverberates across the body of the earth and threads through our nervous systems.
As Saturn swims through the porous waters of Pisces (March 2023-February 2026) we may feel as if we are swimming through opaque waters, a psychic fog where we’ve lost our way. Things disintegrate, boundaries blur in the primal waters of Pisces. We may sacrifice something, release a tsunami of grief that may be collective, archetypal, rather than personal. This may be the time to let go. A person, a job, a way of being in the world as we feel the ache of a difficult choice, open our heart fully. This may be the time to become a creator instead of an algorithm-led consumer. By letting go, loosening our grip on self-growth, and anxious self-improvement, we may float awhile in unfamiliar territory as we absorb by osmosis, a looser life, a life less determined by “influencers” but rather by our own deep force of vitality. As the darkest shadows of human nature emerge in fundamentalism and bigotry, the swell of watery Pisces energy has a slower rhythm that meanders, pervades our dream time, flows into our creative life, cleanses, and revitalises faith, restores hope. Saturn was last in Pisces in the 1990s as AIDs ravaged the lives of millions. The Soviet Union toppled, and the Internet transformed the way we think and talk.
Now as Saturn returns to Pisces, José Ortega y Gasset’s celebrated quote, “tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are,” may prompt us to notice where the gaze of our attention lands.
Those who experience their Saturn Returns in Pisces over the next three years, and those of us who have planets in the mutable signs of Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, and Sagittarius may be prompted to create art, music, poetry; discover a gift for needlework or photography, or focus on maturing a spiritual practice. Saturn in Pisces will transfigure the ordinary, arrive in a turn of events that strike us like an annunciation, as we choose to see differently, consciously do differently. In Pisces, we dive deep into opaque waters where music and poetry melt walls that divide. We may experience, in the words of Eckhardt Tolle, “all things that truly matter―beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace―arise from beyond the mind.”
Venus moves into Mars-ruled Aries on the new Moon, signifying a shift in tenor in our daily interactions with others, an opportunity to revaluate how we can live in this world more soulfully. Expansive Jupiter meets Chiron (in orb from February 28th- exact from March 10th-March 13th) joined by Venus in Aries (March 2nd-4th). Chiron is associated with the evocative image of The Wounded Healer who takes away our suffering, and in our horoscope, also one who wounds. Chiron/Jupiter contacts often accompany grandiose aspirations that may inflate/deflate as we pursue “enlightenment” or constantly feel the need to speak “our truth” or follow “our bliss.”
This conjunction activates the Aries part of our horoscope (self-expression, will, courage, action) offering inspiration and motivation to re-connect with a deep force of vital energy, to feel a stirring of passion and creativity, and to know ourselves more intimately. Mercury joins Chiron and Jupiter in Aries on March 25th as perceptions shift, new insights may wash to the shore of our consciousness.
A faerie-circle of golden spring crocuses waiting expectantly for the bees may remind us that everything is interconnected. A homeless woman, hollow-eyed, thinner than her beloved dog, may stir our compassion. The mute suffering of factory-farmed animals may compel us to be more discerning about the food we choose to buy. Searing temperatures, drought, and fire, may prompt community spirit. Our challenge will be to remain alert to the moray eels, the sharp shards of shell concealed beneath the opaque waters of Pisces.
“Certain things grow in darkness. Babies, dreams, roots…” wrote psychologist Jill Mellick.
As the tethered fish of Pisces draw us deeper, may they guide our prayers and direct our faith, so that we can hold on tight to the dreams that grow in the darkness.
For private astrology consultation, please email me: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
The soul is covered by a thousand veils—Hazrat Inayat Khan
Nature stirs here in the north. The days begin to stretch into greening hillsides smudged with impressions of lilac and fuchsia as heather blooms amidst a stippling of wildflowers.
I felt like some watcher in the skies when a new planet swims into his ken—John Keats.
“We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world,” writes Gabor Maté.
Now let us welcome the New Year, full of things that have never been—Rainier Maria Rilke.
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath―Margaret Atwood.
Light and shadow are opposite sides of the same coin. We can illuminate our paths or darken our way. 
Sibling stories underline Rome’s foundation myth and draw us into the story arcs of fiction and movies like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, SK Tremayne’s chilling story about the death of a twin, The Ice Twins, and the marvellous Harry Potter books. Gemini is also the sibling we love or loathe, the bonds of blood that bind or divide. The Swimmers (Netflix 2022) is a Gemini story that marries the light and the darkness of two young sisters, Sara and Yusra, who escape the trauma of the war in Syria in a leaking boat, hoping to be reunited with their family. Theirs is a story of sexual assault by a trafficker, soulless immigration queues, barren refugee detention centres, and the triumph of being selected to compete in the Rio Olympics of 2016.
This month, Mercury-ruled Gemini appears as the winged messenger, delivering choices which are seldom packaged in black and white, choices that arrive on the restless wind and arc through the air like the ideas that tumble through our minds. It is in the light and the dark of our relationships that we encounter our human complexity and discover the light and the dark within us.
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again—Katherine May.
The luminous lives of public figures portray the astrology of the moment. Prince Charles became Charles III during this eclipse season, and he will be crowned on May 6th during a Mercury Retrograde cycle and the day after a lunar eclipse—two celestial significators that suggest he will not settle comfortably on the throne. Charles was born on an eclipse, and will be familiar with this energy, so it’s unlikely that he will be beheaded like his predecessor, or banished to Europe. His Solar Return in 2023 (Sun/Mars conjunction in the 3rd house and Neptune on the Descendant) also suggests that his reign will not be an easy one as ghosts from the past return. Already truths blend with fantasy as the acerbic effect of the Mars/Neptune square can be seen in the “dangerous lies” peddled by the media, portrayed in season Five of The Crown.
To be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing—Kevin Hearne.
“Everything you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form,” writes Susan Cain in her new book, Bittersweet: how longing and sorrow make us whole. In a world where enforced smiles and white-knuckled positivity clenches against the wild winds of adversity, she reminds us that “light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.” At this in-between time of transition we may feel suspended between life’s crevices and cracks as Jupiter’s lingering longing expands the bitter and the sweet. And as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us, “before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”
On the eve of a new Scorpio Moon on October 25th, Sun and Moon hold a séance with Venus in regenerative Scorpio, accenting the cartography of our heart. This eclipse amplifies the finality of endings; fertilises a new cycle of growth with the dust of demolition. Tonight, we come back to what we deeply value. And what we must discard or choose to keep. A solar eclipse is a high-voltage new moon, and a new moon encapsulates the seed of a new beginning, a new shaping of our expectations, though we may not be able to see just what they are until the Moon is ripe and full. And as this new moon travels between the Earth and the Sun, darkening the Sun’s brilliance, something, someone may be eclipsed. This symbolism is made all the more poignant in a culture where the brilliance of externalised power and earthly matters command the spotlight in 24-hour news loops and on social media. The essence of eclipses lingers like an expensive perfume, for two weeks before and after the eclipse. They act as celestial highlighters, amplifying, intensifying energy and they can be game changers.
We may remember that for the ancient Greeks, Fate came in the form of three Moirai, those three sisters who determined the Fate of every living creature. It was Atropos who cut the thin thread of life. We meet Fate when the Nodes of the Moon transit the planets or angles of our birth chart. The South Node draws us back, into the undertow of the past; we hesitate at the threshold, we circle endlessly in our place of discomfort. The North Node is where we see the diamond of our destiny, although the threshold crossing is never easy. Something is calling us to our purpose, our ability as a race to love and heal and to nurture one another and all creatures great and small.
As Nature contracts, exposing an uncompromising knot-work of bare branches and stubble fields; as the primordial pulse of the year stirs deep in our blood and bones, we might sense a slow, steady certainty moving through our body. This lunation carries the seed for repair, for release and renewal, if we trust the instruction of our hearts and know that death, like birth, is both an ending and a beginning. As we pause awhile, in this world of dying things, may those dead places in ourselves open to Love in new and deeper ways.