June 14, 2022 at 6:51am Central—Yesterday as I was walking my dog in the evening, I heard music gently wafting out of the open windows of a neighborhood bar. The singer’s voice, soft and lyrical, billowed song clouds full of moody longing and sadness that abruptly changed the atmosphere surrounding the block. It’s as if I had walked into an auricular fog bank. I couldn’t help but lean against the building and listen for a while.
In a Mexican accent that changes “i” to “e”—river becomes reever—one nostalgic song after the other perfectly dropped into the expectant heart of sundown while comforting a responsive audience. And because the singer knew his crowd—Baby Boomers who had found a second life in magical Mexico—the playlist consisted of songs like Harvest Moon by Neil Young… “Because I’m still in love with you, I want to see you dance again…”, Against the Wind by Bob Seger:
The years rolled slowly past
And I found myself alone
Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends
I found myself further and further from my home, and I
Guess I lost my way
There were oh-so-many roads
I was living to run and running to live
Never worried about paying or even how much I owed
Moving eight miles a minute for months at a time
Breaking all of the rules that would bend
I began to find myself searching
Searching for shelter again and again
Against the wind
A little something against the wind
I found myself seeking shelter against the wind.
And many more. Each of the songs held its arms out to a past that like an apparition in a dream, moved in a gauzy alternate dimension just out of reach. Yet the feelings were full of blood and beat and longing. How is it that music can bewitch us like this?
Tuesday’s Full Moon
Tuesday’s Full Moon in Sagittarius is a bit like these songs and their delivery (accent and all), especially with the square to Neptune and sextile to Saturn. Ruled by Jupiter, Sagittarius is the perennial hero/ine searching for meaning and purpose. If any epitaph goes with Sag it’s “S/he with the most stories wins!” Sag lives to run and runs to live, breaking the rules that would constrict them to any one person, place or thing as they search for a little something against the wind. A sign of mutable fire, you can’t contain Sagittarius: it’s always seeking the next adventure, moving eight miles a minute for months at a time.
But given time and experience, the sextile to Saturn tempers this believin’ moon a little bit. There’s history and the accumulation of wisdom that anchors the flights of fancy to structure and solidity. Maybe the knees can’t do the miles anymore, so the wildness inside becomes tempered. As the skin thins and wrinkles, the heart remains feral, fed by memory and sustained by adaptability.
The square to Neptune is a little more tricky as it could play out in a variety of ways:
- Songs in a bar and a little bit of a buzz that reconnects to a youthful core… in other words: nostalgia that transports to a liminal space where there is no time. Just feeling.
- Dissolution mixed with long-suffering knowing that the glory days have past.
- Outright denial of one’s circumstances and saturnian restrictions.
- Spiritualizing one’s path so that the present moment and tensions therein become the Jupiterian teacher, expanding perspective and evolving wisdom.
What’s the takeaway? Mine is to 1) look at where this Full Moon falls in my chart and then to 2) allow myself to feel and remember the enthusiastic person I once was in this area of my life and to recommit to the wise old lady I hope to grow into. There’s an honoring of self when we remember our past; but we can’t stay there if we’re to collect more stories to alchemize into wisdom. And I suppose I’m giving myself permission as I age to keep running against the wind.