Hello everyone, it is Jamie. The dark moon happens on May 16, at its peak around 3:00 here in New Orleans, with the sun and the moon both at 25 degrees of Taurus.
A dark moon is when the sun and the moon are conjunct and there is no illumination at all. The sun is our masculine, the moon is our feminine, so this is the time of creation, when the two of them are together. If you do not know how to schedule quiet time for yourself, and a lot of us do not, use the moon cycles. The dark moon is two and a half days and it brings you back to center. Then when she starts picking up light again, that is the new moon, and that is when we plan and plant, because now we can see.
Here is the geometry. The sun and moon are conjunct Mercury, who is finishing up in Taurus before he goes home to Gemini. They are conjunct Uranus, who has already moved into Gemini after seven or eight years in Taurus. They are sextiling Neptune in Aries and trining Pluto, now retrograde at 5 degrees of Aquarius.
I see the four fixed signs as pillars. As temples. They are where we go to reset ourselves, because of the kind of energy they hold. And Taurus has just come through an enormous renovation, because Uranus was in there for eight years tearing her temple down and rebuilding it. That was not a small stretch of time and it was not cosmetic. That was the end of one age and the beginning of another, and it is beautiful that the planet that rules Aquarius was the one in there doing the demolition.
Now she is rebuilt, and the sun and the moon are sitting in her, in the dark, listening to the transpersonal planets.
I looked up the word, because I wanted to get it right. Transpersonal experiences are states of consciousness or psychological development that extend beyond the individual personal ego, encompassing wider aspects of humankind, nature, or the cosmos. It literally means beyond the personal, and it points to experiences that expand consciousness past the traditional boundaries of time, space, and identity.
That is where we are. Moving past old identities, past the way we have been using time, past the way we understand space.
The personal planets are the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. They are close to us, and they are our ego, our feelings, our thinking. The transpersonal planets, Uranus and Neptune and Pluto, are much farther out and they represent something different. And in this dark moon, Taurus is the one absorbing what they are saying. Pluto brings the wisdom of death and transformation, which is frightening when you are living through it in real time. Neptune brings spirituality and the unconscious. Uranus scans the cosmos and brings back new ideas from beyond the beyond.
Taurus takes all of it and does what earth does. She puts it somewhere solid.
Which means that if you want the information, you know exactly where to go and none of it is complicated. You commune with the earth. You go outside and lie in the grass. You buy a couple of plants at the hardware store and talk to them every day. You go and sit under the stars. You go sit by the river. If you are landlocked, you find whatever nature you have. That is the map right now.
Think of the Empress. She sits in nature wearing a crown of twelve stars, one for each sign, with water behind her and grain at her feet. She is ruled by Venus and she is about receiving. And think of the Star card, which is Aquarius, one foot on land and one foot in water. Both of them are about working with the intelligence of the earth and the intelligence of the cosmos at the same time, taking what is out there and putting it within.
I also want to say something about pace, because everything is moving very fast and it is a lot. I was talking with a friend who runs her family's business, and every year there is a new thing, and last year's new thing has already blown up and been replaced. There has to be a point where you sit and reassess. Not out of fear of being left behind. Just to ask whether there is a different way to do this.
My mom and I were talking about this when I went home for Mother's Day, about people saying an earlier generation had it so much easier. Every time is relative to its time. People who were having a hard time thirty years ago were having a hard time. People having a hard time now are having a hard time. What you take from that is that the human spirit survives, because it has, repeatedly.
So go to the temple of Taurus. Take a rest. Keep it practical and keep it simple. And if you are involved in sixty eight different things and none of them are simple, that is your answer.