Virgo Season
Blood Moons, Quantum Loops, and Accepting That Waves Come to Shore
I don’t believe in astrology, but I do believe in looking at the sky and matching the vibe of the people around me. Perhaps, at its best, that’s all that astrology is.
Between August 23rd and September 22nd, the sun moves through Virgo.
Virgo is an astrological sign characterised by practicality, and its season is a time for analysing and taking stock. Whether you consider these traits pseudo-scientific or not, they align with the social and seasonal mood. Summer’s mania reaches its zenith and evaporates away, leaving behind the steady cycles of harvesting and returning to school. A cooler front blows in.
At the end of August, I heard a woman compare anxiety to a bird flapping in a cage. By that, she meant that it is an immense, latent energy objecting to enclosure. Without the cage, anxiety is the same being, but it can use the energy to take flight.
Ever since, I have been thinking about how bad things are often just good things in cages. Depression is close to peace; fear is the same frequency as gratitude for what could be lost. The cages that contain them are welded from beliefs.
I set the intention that this Virgo Season would be a time for non-resistance. My mind, consciousness, and body exist in an awkward stalemate, as I imagine they do for most people. My mind drives my body to extremes and excesses. These, in turn, suppress my consciousness. To me, non-resistance is an unlearning. I hope to shed all the dysregulating habits we amass to cope. Remember how to eat when hungry, sleep when tired, write when it feels accessible, and never ignore an instinct.
Non-resistance can also be a moment-by-moment calibration. I wrote about synchronicity earlier this month. The path of least resistance is lit by hundreds of twinging instincts. When I get it right, I feel the birds take flight and hover on warm currents of air.
Resistance calcifies when we move through routines without interrogating them. I have tried to be less subservient to time’s socialised patterns, and in doing so (speaking of synchronicities), I keep catching glimpses of time playing outside its cage. A silver pendulum. A church clock that stopped ticking in 1980. A clockface walking past on a tattooed calf.
Virgo Season has had its fair share of cosmic oddities. On the 7th of September, a lunar eclipse was visible around the world. The moon rolled, full and red, over the horizon, only to be wiped away behind the shadow of the earth. On that night, from my vantage point on Exmoor, the moon re-emerged as bright as the sun and shone in a purple halo. A partial solar eclipse followed on the 21st. That was the last night before the autumn equinox and Libra season. It was only visible at the tip of the southern hemisphere, but even here, where it was dark already, the animals could sense a change.
Animal Time does not experience the resistance I have been trying to deconstruct because animals only know intuition. Human Time insists “this is when you are meant to work, eat, marry, travel.”
When viewed against the sky, Human Time feels like building a wall in a wave.
I have waves on the brain because I read Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale For The Time Being last week. It follows the lives of two women, unfolding on either side of the Tōhoku tsunami. As one woman reads the other’s diary, she transcends the illusion of Human Time and enters the quantum realm to alter the diarist’s story. I also happened to watch The Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Harry knows he can conjure a Patronus because he’s already done it. But that feels less poetic.
Ruth Ozeki is a Buddhist nun. She once stared at her face in a mirror for three hours and wrote an essay on it. By her account, Ozeki approached this event as both a social experiment and a Zen practice. I recognised many of the themes I have been thinking about. The first ten minutes were spent in immense resistance. Her reflection evoked shame and the ever-noisy paranoia, “This is a waste of time.” Then she adapted. She saw beyond her face, saw the features of her ancestors, the thoughts she was refusing to think, and the kernel of non-duality.
Ozeki has said that she conceived of the mirror experiment whilst reading Jennifer Roberts’s paper ‘The Power of Patience.’’ Roberts is an art historian who extols patience. She encourages undergraduate students to spend hours in front of the piece of art they are studying to truly see it.
I went to Hampstead and sat in front of a portrait in Kenwood House. The Countess of Oxford looked inhospitable from her vantage point on the wall. Once I had let that first impression settle, she let me see the truth. She was bemused. Bemused by her husband, her artist, her finery. Bemused that I’d chosen her, the picture of impatience, to cultivate my own. I left feeling like we had spoken across centuries, across a connection comparable to that of Ozeki’s two heroines.
These exercises may seem like the opposite of the animal instincts I described earlier, but Ozeki and the Countess taught me that non-resistance comes hand in hand with acceptance.
I travelled to the Lake District for the final stage of a job I wanted. There were four other applicants at the assessment day, and I was rejected, but it went to the best candidate. She was kind and qualified. She had a car to navigate that remote part of the world, and family close by. I can accept that this is fate choosing the easiest channel to flow through because I would have hired her, too.
In trying to live in tune with what my body wants, I gained a kilo. Then, on the last day of Virgo Season, I managed to lose about eighty in the space of one phone call. That was also the night of the partial solar eclipse. My tiny mobile signal reflected off a satellite, impotent amidst all that cosmic churning, and landed in a different handheld device miles away. Words bounced back and forth across the night sky until the connection was severed. It was rough on the surface, but clear in the depths. He had also been feeling the resistance between us.
Virgo Season is the time of year when the swallows begin to pick up their domesticity and fly South. Each time I saw a swallow depart this month, I was reminded of those wise words about birds and bird cages. I have remembered two poems that describe birds caged within people. The first is from Terrence Hayes’s collection American Sonnets For My Past And Future Assassin.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone. (…) I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
I endeavour to keep my song with my bones. The second is from Anne Sexton’s ‘The Ambition Bird’, where unrealised dreams are confined in the cavities of the heart.
All night dark wings flopping in my heart. Each an ambition bird. The bird wants to be dropped from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge. He wants to light a kitchen match and immolate himself.
It is Libra Season now and I have got closer to something. I do not need a new heart - I enjoy how sentimental and ambitious my current one can be - and I refuse to let resistance make taxidermy of the wings that vibrate there. This post will end here because, as the words come to a natural end, my body is asking me to run. I will wear shorts to feel the last warmth of summer. Through my headphones, Elvis will be singing ‘The Impossible Dream.’