I didn’t want to have to go out again today, but I keep forgetting staples when I go to the store, even if they’re on my list – a trip to Marianos, a trip to Aldi’s – and an Amazon order. For a month, I’ve been eating a diet I call “food that doesn’t hurt my stomach or send my blood sugar surging,” and so far, it’s been great, but that means no running out of food and deciding to order a burrito instead.

And everyone else and their mother is also grocery shopping, so the very thing I want to avoid, I somehow keep making an inevitability because I keep forgetting.

Cue the full moon.

A Cold Cancer Full Moon

The Cancer Full Moon is a particularly strong one because it’s in its natural sign, but this year, it’s opposing Pluto. Sure, yeah, it’s also trining Neptune, which is great for any sort of water-related or mysticism-related work, but the real issue is things coming to a head that change things completely and permanently. It’s a good time to reflect on those events in your life that have caused complete and permanent change. It’s also a really good time to accept those things that have changed who you are at a fundamental level and how you feel you fit into the world around you — do you fit in? Are you in the right “tribe”? How have you grown?

And this is a great time for receiving the gifts of growing. One of the things I always find fascinating about human development is how a child can grow into an adult and look so different from their childhood self — or not — and yet, always show the child they once were in their faces. Some of us bear a great resemblance to our childhood selves, and some of us have changed greatly, and really, the only way we can predict what a child could look like is based on how their parent’s aged and changed.

And moreover, we change with age — this is why I like to do progressions with natal chart readings with anyone over the age of 25 — and this is what we’re supposed to do. We interact with the world, and we let the world teach us things. We grow, we develop, we adapt (and maldapt), and we lose our sharp edges or we strengthen. There’s just simply no way anyone who is truly living their life’s purpose or anything like it is

Or, to put it simply: if you’re 30 or older and you still want the same things you did as a teenager, you’re not doing something right. You’re doing something incredibly wrong.

But, this moon is also opposing Pluto, and if you feel that your heart is being ripped open against your will and that you’re unusually vulnerable right now, you are.

You are raw, and you’re being asked to examine your fears and needs.

The primal fear: the Full Moon opposing Pluto

Abandonment. Powerlessness. Irrelevancy. Feeling trapped in a never-ending emotional cycle that you can never heal from. This full Moon may be triggering all of these things in people, although in a very hidden sort of way: Pluto in Capricorn isn’t an overt power-grabber the way say, Pluto in Leo is: it consolidates power. It creates walls around the things it wishes to contain, slowly, methodically, until one day, it’s bounty is contained….working so slowly, so steadfast that it may not even notice that the gazelle has run away or has even died by the time the cage is done. Moon in Cancer is a baby seeking out its mother and a mother seeking out its baby, both the innocent and the protector of innocence, both of them vulnerable, both of them facing untold fears of the present and the future in a fight for existence in which danger is everywhere.

And the truth is that no matter how hard you try, there are just some things you can’t control: big scary, Plutonian things, like empires, like genetics, like ruthless people who seek power, and you may be wondering when you’re ever going to be free of them.

But you can’t be. You won’t be. These predate you, they exist before you, and they will exist after you (Cancer/Capricorn axis). You can run, you can rationalize their existence, you can alchemically use your fear and turn it into power, and you can join the emperor in his quest to champion the Dark Side of the Force, but you can’t make these things go away.

This is a night to embrace your secrets, the things that make you feel small and vulnerable, and to accept that yes, deep down in you is still that helpless little baby crying out for its mother in a cold world it doesn’t understand…and yet, over the years, so much of you has changed to address that very vulnerability. You’re an adult. You’re strong. You have language. You have an ability to procure all the stuff you need for survival. You are surrounded by others who have your interests in mind for the survival of your kind…or not, because you choose to cut karmic ties (Pluto) and walk a lone path (Capricorn) following the light of a star that only you can see, one that is not eclipsed by the brightness of a full Moon that shines for everyone else.

Because we all have fears, and we all have deep-seated fears that keep us up at night.

You know the ones you think about, those imagined scenarios that terrify you, that make you cry? Are you having more of them now? They’re not just reflections of your deep-seated fears so much as they are reflections of what you think is your karma (Moon), and the circumstances you were born into that you can’t change (Cancer) unless you’re willing to go down very deep (Pluto) and go your own way (Capricorn) from here on out.

Are you willing to do it? Or, perhaps more importantly, can you even do it? Because I tell you, even if I think of myself as alone, on the beginning of a new karmic cycle in this lifetime, I see myself in the mirror and I see staring back at me not just Miriam at 42 years old, but my father, my siblings, my grandfather, my aunts and uncles, my cousins – the people I actually look like, of whose bones my bones are shaped, of whom my flesh is also carved with the same hereditary knife. I wonder who I actually am then, if this cleft chin doesn’t belong to the family known as Smith and if these upturned hooded eyes aren’t so much like my maternal grandfather’s, who somehow has all these parts that belong to all these other people backward and present through history and inevitably, forward as well even if I never have children of my own.

And they say that we tend to be attracted to people who kind of look like us, who resemble us in some way, or resemble one of our parents. Is that true? I have never dated someone who looks like my father; in fact, I have been overtly adverse to it, but looking back, a lot of guys I dated when I was younger looked more like my mother. Was I looking for someone within my current tribe? Is that why it didn’t work. Rick was many things both good and bad, but he was a deviation from that norm, a icebreaker into the new karmic circle for this season of my life. Maybe we could call that love, but something much more primal and much less rational was at work there.

And tonight, as the sun sets and the Moon grows fuller, I wonder about my own hidden motivations, my own shadow emotions, and I’m just glad I didn’t have to interact with anyone in a professional manner today.

Intense shifts in the tides…literally and figuratively.

Two things I can tell you about in the news so far:

A massive underwater volcanic eruption; and

Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t going to be protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s inner circle for much longer, or at least eight of them.

What’s the similarities? A volcanic eruption (Pluto) from underneath the ocean (Cancer) that causes a tsunami (Moon) that threatens the coasts of many countries (Capricorn) is a fascinating and terrifying reminder that we don’t control the Earth; ultimately, it controls us, and unlike us, Earth isn’t interested in control or power over anything because it has no fear. A volcano doesn’t erupt on our schedules nor does it care what it affects. It just does. Despite all we can put our minds to, all we can build, all we can dream about, in the end, we are still at the mercy of Mother Earth for all the things we need. Hey – even if we go into space, we still need to somehow recreate the conditions that exist on Earth, because we still need air, water, gravity (or resistance to keep us strong), and food. We can grow up and escape Earth, but we cannot escape how she has shaped us and how she continues to shape us.

And we call this nature.

I don’t have a prediction for whom Ghislaine Maxwell is going to stop protecting, although I have my suspicions, and that these people will be both red and blue, and that their people will refuse to believe despite. Is Bill Clinton is named, there will still be Leftists who don’t care about him or the survival of the Democratic Party; if Donald Trump is named, there will still be Republicans who don’t care if the alt right survives this scandal or not. The royal family has proven that it can go on without Prince Andrew, and it has. If Dershovitz is named, it’s going to be one hell of a gathering at the watering hole for all the lawyers in America.

But you know what it won’t be?

It won’t be a time in which we reflect how men in power can willingly enslave children for sex simply because they can.

It won’t be a time in which people start to question the veracity of the Qanon conspiracy theory.

It won’t be a time in which people will start to wonder, en masse, if their sacred cows should come down and become impossible burgers instead.

Not yet anyway – that would be the promise of Jupiter in Pisces, right? The big dissolution, the melting pot? This is the time of grumbling, of say-it-ain’t-so, of conspiracy theories, of even wilder rationalizations for the already wild things we’re learning.

You want revolution? You want a breakdown? You want the rains from heaven to erode the temples to the old gods, to flood the markets, and to carry away the money lender’s ledger’s?

Saturn in Pisces, friends. Jupiter in Pisces is when the zit grows and comes to a head; Saturn in Pisces pops it. One more year of this, one more year of watching the world swell up and push against the barrier as Jupiter nudges toward Aries. And it’s not that this can’t be a great time for those with planets and points in the mutable signs especially, because underneath that swelling is that shift that makes us decide “hey, I don’t actually need all this pus, do I? I mean, it’s already done it’s job…”

People with the least to lose tend to lose the least, you know.

An intense need for comfort

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that the Full Moon is happening during a time when it’s pretty cold is all the more reason to put your indoors. Regardless of whether you’re doing a ritual tonight, I would suggest throwing your own arms around yourself – is it an embrace, or is it restraint? Because sometimes, it can be both, but all creatures tend to feel calmer with some pressure applied to their bodies, you know? Even a goat when stressed will “hug” you, as in, lean on you. So will a dog. So will a cat. So will a person. It’s primal.

You are, after all, one of billions of babies all over the world, babies of all ages, trying their best to grow up and to figure out exactly what it means to grow up, to be an adult.

And the truth?

We’re all just babies. Natal charts are snapshots of the blueprint of a newborn infant, you know, and yet, so much of a natal chart resonates with us at any age because of the baby that remains wrapped inside the adult.

And if the baby cries tonight, why not just give the baby his or her bottle and tell them everything will be alright? I mean, sure: you don’t actually know that for certain, but hey, neither does the baby.

You don’t have to listen to me.

You can also use this energy to do some tremendous ancestral work. You may even see witches fly tonight. you may search cosmic history for wondrous, hidden things. The only thing I can tell you is that with Pluto at the gates, something – or someone – may come through powerfully but not necessarily wanted. Needed? Perhaps. Will you know for certain right now, though? It depends – what does a baby know of it’s own good?

Happy Full Moon!