Full Throttle Twist + Tumble

A Scorpio New Moon

Oct 30, 2024

I am always so taken by Scoprio season’s vibrant autumnal displays in this Pacific Northwest place I call home. A place that wears the seasons on its sleeves. I grew up in the desert, you see, and while it is a place full of its own color and vibrance, my desert homeland is not a place that knows autumn.

I’m especially tuned in this year, as I embarked last June in a year of re-learning the zodiac through relationship with the land I am embedded within. My first autumn in the Pacific Northwest was marked with awakenings of the ways the constantly shifting skyscapes mirrored the innerscapes of my Scorpio Moon soul. Now, 20 years later, my gaze has been drifting down to clusters of blackened rotting mushrooms, strange omens in the dirt, blood red leaves smearing across wet windshields, and then up again to the trees getting whipped around by the wind.

selective focus of purple leaf plant — Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Scorpio is change itself. Big change. As fixed water, it demonstrates its modality so differently than its fellow fixed mode signs Taurus, Leo and Aquarius. Instead of rooting down, or wielding its elemental power in the heart or the mind Scorpio commits to the tides, fully aware that change is the only constant. Full throttle twist and tumble. As an energetic within us, Scorpio roto-rooters out that which is dead and stagnant – fixed – so that regeneration can occur. In the external world we see Scorpio in processes of rot and decay, composting and regrowth. We also see it in the barrel of the tidal wave, or rushing torrents of water that clear everything in their path.

Scorpio is libidinous and full of desire. During Scorpio season, the full strength of my already pronounced sex drive comes alive within me. I crave carnal, rambunctious, primal sex as a way of surfing the torrents within. My sex drive has its seasons, too. Never more than a stone’s throw away, but something to be reckoned with this time of year, as the darkness gets closer and my emotions rise and fall. Whereas springtime sensuality begs for a softer yet still carnal pleasure, Scorpio vibes feel more dominant and pressing. Full of growls and gasps and need.

I’ve been thinking of the times in my adult life when I have been thrust into Scorpionic experiences. Whether close to literal death myself or the death-as-metaphor of transformation, I emerge wanting to fuck. To merge. To let bliss and orgasm and sweat blot out the mind chatter that is with me all the time. Someone once told me that made sense; brushes with death often lead to a need to reach for what is most life-affirming. Sex is indeed that for me. But oh the intensity. The highs and lows.

But such is life, I suppose. Especially these days.

This Scorpio season’s New Moon arrives Friday, November 1 at 5:47am Pacific in the depths of some very loud and clear astrology – and on the precipice of yet another defining moment in history. I have been thinking about the fact that the US presidential election always arrives with the Sun in Scorpio. Power transfers. And the ways power is used and abused in my country and throughout the world.

And yet, the purported transformation of American democracy’s most lauded ritual of voting pales in comparison to the red hot, gushing and rushing magma of true Scorpionic processes which will ultimately reveal truth. Whether getting there is pleasant or not.

I suppose that election season can and does provoke the lashing martial side of Scorpio’s scorpion representative. Highly defensive and sometimes lethal, a baby scorpion does not yet understand how to use its venom wisely, instead injecting all it has to any perceived threat. Through Scorpio and its fellow Mars-ruled sign Aries we also learn strategy. Elections require strategy, for presidential regimes can perpetuate nightmare – the fear of it, the reality of it and the grief associated with it.

Oh yes. The unpredictable and tumultuous nature of grief, which flows unimpeded through the water signs.

Grief is a constant for many of us these days and yet we exist in a culture with so few rituals and strategies for navigating grief’s tides. And even for those who are well equipped: how do we metabolize this level of grief?

Grief and its eddies of overwhelm, rage and despair are natural responses to the earth, our lives and our bodies. Grief is a vital technology for cleansing and clearing. Acknowledging and wailing into our grief is a revolutionary act in a culture that avoids emotion and the realities of death. All of the cliches are true: grief processes remind us that our hearts can break, that they can heal, and that it is utterly and necessarily human to feel grief over what we have lost and what we are losing. But it’s hard not to get stuck there. And we cannot get stuck. Scorpionic passion affirms the heights of life, too.

sea waves during daytime — Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

The ruler of this lunation, Mars in Cancer, is now facing off with lord of the underworld Pluto in the final degree of Capricorn. I will be writing more about this alignment soon, but for now: the opposition between these two highlights a fundamental quandary we are all facing individually and as a collective now: how we bring the desires of our ego into the service of the desires of our soul. Which means we must get real about not just what we desire, but how that has shaped our view of ourselves and the world – and from there figure out what needs to be transformed.

Mars-Pluto oppositions are often harbingers of intensified conflict, violence and extreme events. As this configuration plays out on the world stage, themes of power and powerlessness are bound to be magnified alongside feelings of helplessness that might be amplified by the building existential despair of the swamplands forming around Saturn and Neptune in Pisces. These are hard words to write, but if you are reading this I imagine you have at least some awareness of the truth of the matter. If not, welcome. Grab some tea and lean into the support of the millions of others facing these truths with you.

The whole point of a participatory, grounded and relational astrology is that as much as it can reflect potentials that feel heavy and foreboding, it points us toward ways to work with what arises while showing us the best that can be hoped for. Which is, if you ask me, a turning of the tides and an emergence into heart-and-vitality-centered ways of existing. Astrology is as much about the earth and our bodies as it is the skies and stars. Our embeddedness within it is an inherently relational container that can and will hold us through it all.

This New Moon blesses the coming lunar cycle with a grand water trine that can support soothing words, ease with emotional expression, and heaping doses of healing empathy – whether you need to receive it or want to give it (or both). Mars as ruler of the lunation requires us to ask questions of what it means to see protection as care and care as protection. That Mars opposition with Pluto is a systems check: what and who are you fighting [for] and why?

No, but really: why? Scorpionic times are often also highly reactive times. Remember the lashing of the scorpion, and defensive positions based in the will to survive. But the symbolism of Scorpio – scorpion, eagle, phoenix (or sometimes dove) – gives us additional ways of working with intensity. Eagle is an intermediary and threshold guardian, able to rise above for insight, while also accompanying us into the depths as needed. And Phoenix… well, out of the ashes, new beauty is born. Eternal return is a fact of existence in this universe, not just a mythical snafu co-opted by religion. Scorpio energetics steward intense psychospiritual processes so that we can become something new.

This ain’t no love and light process, and no new agey bypassing will get the necessary jobs of the now done. Scorpio is the deeply gnarly alchemy of being utterly reformed by magma, and then slowly cooling to crystalline ribbons buried in dirt over time.

Our cells are embedded with memories of these ancient processes. We know how to do the work that must be done now. We also remember that bodies need rest. Pleasure. Sustenance.

In energies as charged as these we would all do well to tend the thresholds of our psyche and the temple of our bodies, paying particular attention to our dreams and our emotional responses. Doing the work of letting emotions flow out and through, and acknowledging that there might be big time potential for (temptation to?) re-script or re-imprint old wounds.

I recommend grief circles, ancestral reconnection and/or healing work, rituals, vigils and being proactive about having things in place to help you cope. If a happy or sad movie to help with some laughing or crying catharsis is all you have in you - that’ll do, too. My favorite resources for navigating grief as a necessary and revolutionary tool for survival and world building come from The Work That Reconnects.

Remember, too, that Scorpio is Passion. What are you passionate about and what are ways to tap into that now, letting passion flow through rather than being flung out.

When I think practically: prioritize your emotional health without turning away from the hard stuff if you’re able. Refresh your wards and protections and engage in the most basic witch work (tending your hearth, home and altar). Lean into your relationships – with yourself, your people and creatures, earth, sky, water and fire.

Although Scorpio is in many ways the epitome of death-rebirth cycles, therefore emphasizing these cycles now, the entire era we are living through is very much about rebirth in that we are all midwives to the process of birthing a new paradigm at the same time as we are all death doulas to the collapse of the old one -- and the labor pains, woven into so many dying gasps, have been brutal and exhausting.

But there is no way out but through. So remember to look for love in it, too.

(Just a note: my astrology + soul work practice has been focused on helping folks navigate personal and collective rites of passage for 15 years. If you’d like to work with me, I have four openings left for new clients in 2024. I would love to meet you.)

Full Throttle Twist + Tumble

A Scorpio New Moon

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