How does your winter come? On the Moon in Scorpio and Ancestor Work
Astrologers are pretty down on the Scorpio moon. I get it, it’s the Moon trying to Moon in the depth hell of Mars, with all our lovely analogies such as composting and sewers, decay and waste disposal. In Taurus, the Moon gets to hold on and up without tax nor sacrifice, while in Scorpio her holding becomes constriction and compression, sometimes imposed without mercy.
The sumac is reddening at its edges here. Yesterday, while driving through the backroads of western MA, I longed for my autumnal affect to be any one other than grief. I miss the Cancer striving while in the grasp of shortest nights. That ease into the lazy summer heat of Leo. We have one last breath of Virgo accounting for it all while there’s still more light than dark.
I experience the rapid overcoming of green by the fiery colours of the fallen Libran sun as a giving up, as retreat, as the descent of life back into the earth. As the daylight hours shorten, the sky itself becomes inhospitable. The cricket’s chirp slows. My often overwhelming intimacy with ecological processes comes with acceptance but also a cowering. I know others who experience the autumn as relief, and I gaze at it in clients and friends with an appreciative envy.
I’m not on the southern tip of Vancouver Island this autumn, and I already know I will long for it. As it doesn’t freeze there often, autumn is just another season of growth and renewal. As the deciduous leaves fall, the sun reaches the forest floor for the first time in months and amid their slow rot, the moss breathes anew and ferns explode in effervescent greens, in November. The salmon return to spawn and perish, their decaying scales feeding the stream banks with protective oils and the promise of more life in spring.
I grew up with bitter prairie winter. I know the glory of fatal temperatures and snow blindness. I value the resilience of every one of my ancestors who survived there through wood stoves and root cellars. A friend moved back from Spain last week to rural Ontario. He commented it was so strange to see all the buildings made of wood, how it made everything seem so precarious, so tentative. It is. We are.
I finished Mallorie Vaudoise’ Honouring Your Ancestors yesterday. It’s absolutely lovely, beginner friendly without any inanity, firm recommend. Her suggested practices hinge on a true love-of-being-alive that ancestor work eventually and nearly always accidentally instills in us.
My ancestor practice began with Saturn crossing my Pluto, deepened at my Saturn return. Prior to that, I would not have been able to say with any confidence that I fucking love being alive, but two days ago, and to my surprise, I said exactly that out loud. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction was sextile my natal Saturn within minutes. The week of the conjunction, I found myself teaching a class on the Saturn cycle itself to a group of 12, ages ranging from 22 to 62. I’ve been so blessed with life, to be able to witness and cohere relationship through the cycles of birth and death, grief and regeneration. I’ve experienced clients who give birth, who transition. I’ve yet to experience a client’s death.
We haven’t had a Scorpio moon that didn’t oppose Uranus since March 2019. On a Uranus station directly opposite my natal Pluto in Scorpio, I quit cigarettes for good, after over a decade of regular smoking. It was primarily a commitment to climbing mountains, but also a commitment to living longer than I used to think was desirable. We only have a couple Scorpio moons left until every one will be squared by Saturn.
The Saturn-Uranus squares of 2021 will impact the natal Pluto signatures of the Pluto in Scorpio generation. Outside of the perfected aspects, whenever the moon enters a fixed sign, it’ll set it off the whole cross. There are depths the Moon can’t reach anywhere but in Scorpio, and those are depths we need for life to continue, and to commit to it despite full disclosure. With Saturn in Aquarius, it won’t be nearly as easy to get down there nor to find our way back up. Easy is not a word anyone would use for the Moon in Scorpio, except in that its passages (and its natives) readily facilitate the admission of grief, of sorrow, of devastation, of rage. In our world, we need those midwives and admissions, especially now.
Sometimes I need to acknowledge that another winter of ice feels impossible. I breathe. I bring home a houseplant. This one is curly and dark green on top, with shining magenta undersides. It’s soft like moss, and doesn’t seem to mind being touched. To use a houseplant as an analogy for love despite loss might be contrived, but the lesson stands. I listen to fading maple saplings and they say, “We are thirsty and we are tired. Let us sleep until we can breathe again. Those of us who survive will be all the stronger for it.”
