New Moon in Pisces
Uncloaking the miraculous
Mar 17
The new moon comes through at 28 degrees of Pisces on Wednesday March 18th at 9:23pm eastern time. This lunation is a soft landing for a rough and tumble eclipse season that calls us back to unattended subterranean spaces in our emotional and spiritual lives. The sun and moon are both ruled by Jupiter recently stationed direct in Cancer which adds a caring and private flavor to the upcoming month. Mercury is also setting up to station direct conjoined the moon’s north node in Pisces on Friday March 20th which suggests we will be compelled towards making our more personal dreams an external reality.
The signs of Virgo and Pisces straddle the equinox points with Virgo heralding the coming of the dark in the autumnal equinox and Pisces heralding the light in the vernal equinox. A way to imagine Pisces is as a scuba diver just under the surface of the ocean. This diver can look up and see the sun through the waves and also look down to see the murky depths that obfuscate the deep ocean floor. The diver, Pisces, can neither see the sun nor the ocean floor clearly. In each direction its view is slightly obscured and skewed.
Since it cannot fully perceive this light, Pisces glamorizes the light with narratives of mythic divine perfection, much as the opposing sign of Virgo glamorizes the darkness with narratives of mythic demonic sin. Pisces conjures an image of Eden, Virgo conjures an image of hell. But these images are conjured and not emblematic of reality. It is for this reason that Virgo seems to always imagine it has committed a sin that does not exist and Pisces seems to imagine a rosy perfection that does not exist. Both signs have blind spots in different directions, and they fill in those blind spots with what they believe or want to be present, not necessarily what actually is or is not present.
As the moon renews in Pisces, we are most likely called to ask ourselves where we have projected a sense of perfection that in reality does not exist. We may be asked to examine long standing cycles of idealization and disappointment as we grapple with bringing an aspirational Eden down to the unavoidably messy world of humanity. And with the new moon so close to the very end of the zodiac, we may be asked to once and for all release ourselves from the shackles of a standard of purity that does not exist.
The release from this prison begins with letting reality fill in the blind spots rather than imagination. When Pisces encounters reality it can feel like a betrayal. What was imagination was conflated with reality, and the ensuing fallout of this imaginative bubble popping can be quite destabilizing. But as Pisces begins to realize that it was worshipping a distorted fragmentation of its own projected mind, it slowly begins to see that tangible existence, the realm of the good old fashioned real, has a beauty all of its own. To extend our metaphor, it’s as though the diver surfaces and sees the sun clearly for the first time. It may not be the mythologized image as seen from below the waves, but it has its own innate splendor.
The new moon ruled from Cancer also suggests that there is something that has just been born and is in the tender stages of early development. When we shed the ideal for the real, we can shepherd this new creation with more love and more sustainability. The shadow of Pisces is a dogmatic intolerance for its projected “fill in the gaps” imagination to be contaminated by the unholy audacity of reality. When Pisces is affronted in such a way, it is easy for a sign that projects compassion to shun the object of this perceived imperfection in disgust.
Jupiter in Cancer asks us to nurture the reality of what we are and what is right in front of us. It reminds us that infancy is wondrous and at the same time confounding, unsteady, and messy. And it reminds us that often what we think are contaminating factors are actually the aspects of our experience that are showing us true perfection.
And as the new moon resets us for the month to come, the uncanny imagination of Pisces can be put to use not to fill in the gaps of distorted forms, but to summon us forward towards a truly satisfying new adventure. We can imagine that what might be just above the surface of the water could be infinitely more exciting than what we thought was there.
The trick is to trust the manifestation that comes even as it carries variants from our vision. Visions are not meant to be lived, they are meant to summon life, inform life, and carry us forward. As we summon the vision, we also nurture its manifested form into being by allowing that manifested form to also carry its own life. How often have we received something we so much wanted but it was not what we thought it would be? How often have we received blessings but kicked them aside because they did not meet a strict vision we held in our minds of how they “should” appear or manifest?
This new moon invites us to create the vision and let the cosmos bring us the form that is the right manifestation of that vision. If we can see the materialization of the vision as it appears, we may welcome new gifts into our experience that go far beyond our ability to conceive in our own minds. We can trust that a bigger mind can fill in the gaps for us much better than we can. In our humility, blessings may seem to magically appear right in front of our eyes. Not because they magically materialized, but because we released the perceptual distortions that prevented them from being seen. As this moon is reborn, it uncloaks the miracles that have always been sparkling just under the surface.