Waning Moon in Virgo

The Moon entered Virgo at 5:53am EDT, in the last day of her waning cycle. Virgo Moons are often tough times for me, reminders of everything I should be and am not. This transit, echoing the balsamic relationship between my natal Moon and Sun, during this Mercury retrograde in Virgo, is especially, sharply poignant.

wabi sabi tea bowl

The Moon's key aspects today are a flowing trine with Pluto, engine of our deepest transformations (10:17am) and a conjunction with Mercury, ruler of Virgo (5:13pm). She reaches perigee, her closest approach to the Earth, at 11:47pm. This is an especially intense Virgo day, when we may feel achingly aware of everything less than perfect in ourselves and in our lives.

April Elliott Kent's New Moon post, Less Than Perfect, addresses this head on, reminding us that life itself is less than perfect, and that's not only ok, it's actually rather nice ... beautiful, in fact. This is the Japanese principle of wabi sabi, understanding and accepting the world in all its asymmetrical, anomalous, quirky glory.

Virgo is, after all, an Earth sign, with a practical understanding of the physical, manifest world. Virgo loves the world, and only wants to make it better. A desire to serve and willingness to work are Virgoan strengths. Perhaps it is her aesthetic that sometimes needs refocusing. Virgo can get so focused in analysis, seeing in her Mercury mind the very image of perfection, that she loses touch with another strength ... which is, literally, touch.

planting coconut trees

Joyce Mason at Radical Virgo reminds us that Virgo is often clairkinetic, the ability to feel things in the body. This can be experienced as an acute hypersensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights or chaotic environments. When trained and balanced, it becomes the ability to feel energies as bodily sensations, a valued skill in many indigenous shamanic and healing traditions.

To find balance and love the world as it is, Virgo needs to use her hands. This attunes us to the Earth, rekindling our inborn awareness of life as it is. Laying our hands on the physical, the stuff of this world, cloth, brick, water, the bark of trees, and spikiness of grass, the pulse of life, we feel our connection and learn again how we are called to serve.

And yet, in this last day of the waning cycle, we are keenly aware of all we hold, but cannot hold on to. This is the time of releasing, acknowledging another key value in wabi sabi: impermanence. This is the deep paradox of the manifest world, so tangibly present and so quickly gone. It's not easy for Virgo, seeing the image of perfection so clearly, willing to work so hard to make it happen, and knowing that change comes as quickly as shifting tides.

Perhaps we need to let go of the very idea of perfection as a fixed state. The wisdom of Virgo is the wisdom of the hands, of the body, and of the Earth itself. To be useful, a thing need not be beautiful in some ideal way. Indeed, the beauty of things is in their usefulness. More than this, the beauty of things is in their thing-ness. Every manifest thing expresses the patterns that created it, and each is a perfect miracle.