The Moon
The Moon is the comma between “as above” and “so below.” The Moon is a magic mirror that absorbs stellar light and reflects form — now suddenly muscle, bone, fur, and chlorophyll.
The Moon does not embody but in-bodies. The Moon is doctor, dollmaker, mother, and Death. The Moon is the fate-spinner.
The Moon swells and diminishes. The Moon is the threshold-walker. Nurse of starts, nurse of ends. Not even Mercury changes so fast.
To me, the Moon comes in pale lichen and white porcelain, in iridescent fish scales, indigo-veiled, amber at its neck, arms holding so much woad.
The Moon comes to me as a creeping shapeshifter, a grinning werewolf prince, a lady with willow branches for hair, gazing into a silver bowl of stars. I see the Moon drowning in a lake, no, it is floating and grinning, and now breaking apart in the water. Always upon its back, skin covered in algae, moss, and green patina. The Moon is an elongated figure in pale gray and saffron, with long fingers sticking weaving blue spiderwebs among bluets it gathered. The Moon is every gain and every loss, every coming into and out of form.
I can no longer ask “what does the Moon mean?” It feels rude. Instead, I shiver near its silver light, its wolf-mouth, its closing door, watching seeds fall from its eyelids and try to notice. I try to notice not what the Moon means but what it is up to. What it gathers, morphs, fruits, and releases. What messages might be in the shadow of its pockets.
The Moon spins starlight into your flesh. The Moon sets the board. It is the terror and relief of fate. What does the Moon mean? Everything.
The Moon is change. The Moon in your chart is what was changing. What kind of change, what rhythm patterns your life, how we clutch to comforts, how we open our hands to let them go, how we meet the crowd, how we exchange and pray, how we become small Moons and bring to form what was not yet here. The fixed stars tied to your Moon conduct their light into the changing, into the very environment of your life.
This post will probably not help you delineate the Moon in your chart much. It’s not that kind of post. But I hope it feels like an invitation to sit with this pearl-tooth freak, this cold compress to your forehead, this threshold-walker, this swollen fruit and dying cry, this soft blanket of night.
Originally written in January 2024