To Surrender To The Waters That Hold You – New Moon in Pisces

Imagine that you have been rowing a little boat, alone, on an ocean so vast that you cannot see where it ends. You have been rowing for what feels like lifetimes and, perhaps in the truest sense, it has been.

Sometimes you have met another soul out on the water, someone who could row beside you for a while, someone who made the crossing feel less solitary. Sometimes, you met someone who stole your paddles when you weren't looking, or who rowed for you if you were lucky enough to have been born into the right family, the right body, the right century... And sometimes – hello Sedna! – someone who wanted to throw you overboard entirely, who decided that your disappearance would be more convenient than your survival!

Most of us have simply been rowing, furiously and desperately, trying with everything we have to reach a shore, any shore, anything solid, anything that would finally allow us to get out of the water and rest. Not because the ocean itself is evil or wrong, but because we have been doing this alone for so long that we have completely forgotten there was ever anything other than rowing, any other way of moving through life.

This New Moon is the moment the oars finally drop from your hands, and you realize that the current has been carrying you all along, that it has known where you were going even in the moments when you were most certain you were lost.

The Ninth Wave by Ivan Aivazovsky (1850)

And what if, just for a moment, you allowed yourself to stop?

What if you let the oars rest on the bottom of the boat, let yourself drift without agenda? And what if you let the ocean, this vast and ancient and intelligent body of water that has held every soul who has ever lived hold you too, just as it has been trying to hold you all along?

Feel that for a moment before you read on.

This is what this New Moon whispers to us, from that place beneath words where true knowing lives: the ocean has always known. We carry it inside us — this cerebrospinal rhythm, this inner ocean that travels in our spine, from the sacrum to the brain. It has always known where our shore is, and it has never stopped carrying us there. All we need to do is stop rowing against it. To let ourselves be brought exactly where we were always destined to arrive. Not any shore. Ours. The one that has been waiting for us since the very beginning.

✨ I will offer you a ritual at the end of this piece to help you feel your way toward this.

The Ocean Is Full

Six celestial bodies gather in Pisces for this New Moon, a convergence that happens perhaps once in a generation. Among them: the North Node, Mercury retrograde, Mars, the Shaolin monk, and the New Moon herself at 28°, the very last degree of the zodiac.

The last exhale before everything begins again.

Notice what arrives first in Pisces, at 4°, before all the others: Vesta, the asteroid of the sacred flame, the inner hearth, the tended fire at the center of the temple.

Even the sky seems to be saying, before anything else is said : tend to the fire inside before the flood comes, because the flood is coming and the flame is what will guide you through it.

My natal Mercury is also at 4° Pisces. I have always thought in image, in felt sense, in intuition rather than in logic. For a long time, like so many others, I was taught that this couldn't be real intelligence.

Below is a goddess I made at 17, in clay, inspired by the Venus of Willendorf, as part of an art project comparing the supermodels of the 90s to the image of the original goddess. Clearly not a spitting image of Kate Moss! My teenage hands knew something I am still remembering decades later...

What about you, long ago, what younger part of you knew the current was carrying you all along?

The Goddess – photo by Violaine Anna Maria Coppennolle

This New Moon, with Vesta leading the entire Pisces stellium, feels like a vindication of everything I was told to doubt about myself. If you too have spent years being told that your way of knowing is not quite rational enough, not quite acceptable by the standards of a world that has long confused analysis with intelligence, then this lunation is yours as much as it is mine. It is here to tell you that you were right all along.

This is not a New Moon for type A, left-brain approach. It is not a New Moon for making plans or setting intentions in the usual sense of those words.

It is a New Moon for remembering, for going back down into the waters where the oldest knowing lives, and trusting what you find there.

The Letting Go

Mercury is retrograde and conjunct the North Node at 8° Pisces, our mind and our destiny at the same point in the sky. The direction opening now cannot be found through effort or analysis. It lives beneath the mind, in the place where knowing comes before words.

I feel this deeply. This conjunction sits on my natal Moon in the 8th house, the realm of what is hidden and transformed. The direction I am being asked to follow does not live in thought, but in the emotional body, where truth is felt before it can be explained. Do you feel this too? Something ancient rising, asking to be heard?

And yet the world around us is not quiet! This invitation inward is not a turning away from the surrounding chaos. But what else can we do but go inward, back, and down, to where knowing lived before doubt. What did we inherently know before we were taught to question it? What part of us has been waiting for this moment to speak?

Mercury turns direct on March 20th, with the Spring Equinox. For now, we are in the calm before the storm. What we remember now will become the talisman we carry forward.

Stepping into Primordial Fire

For the first time in 165 years, the ocean god enters fire. Neptune leaves Pisces and steps into Aries, the spark of the primordial fire, where it will remain until 2039. The era of dissolution gives way to action. The dream now asks to move.

At 3° Aries, Saturn meets Persephone, who crossed into the underworld as an initiate, not a victim, and chose her own transformation even when it looked like devastation. She has now stepped into Aries – and Saturn is there to meet her and acknowledge her. What you have been through is your backbone, your foundation. The descent you survived is the ground you now stand on.

The Goddess Knew

Jupiter is at 15° Cancer, the degree of Sirius, the star of Isis, whose rising announced the flooding of the Nile. This was not a catastrophe, but a gift. The flood made the land fertile.

Jupiter at this degree sits exactly on my natal Ceres, and I think of the statue of this goddess who has sat with me for nearly three decades. She never stopped showing me this: the feminine principle has always been here from the very beginning, keeping the flame while we rowed our little boat to exhaustion.

Sirius is associated with the feminine intelligence that trusts, that knows, as Ceres had to learn, as every mother and every soul must learn, that those we love most sometimes have to descend into darkness to become who they were always destined to become. Letting go is not a loss, but the very condition for receiving abundance.

Jupiter is amplifying every opportunity that presents itself to you now, and the true gift is this: you can surrender to the waters that hold you. Abundance is waiting for you, patiently as the goddess, patiently as the star of Sirius that rises at exactly the right moment.

A Closing Ritual

On the night of March 18th, moving into the early hours of March 19th, or in the days immediately surrounding this New Moon when the energy is still alive and present, find a quiet moment and a candle if you have one, and a piece of paper. Give yourself enough stillness that you can actually feel the water beneath you and around you before you begin to write.

You are going to write a letter to yourself, but from your future self. From the one who has already crossed the waters and is standing on the new shore right now. It knows with absolute love and compassion, and with complete clarity what this long dissolution has been for and where it has always been carrying you – from the very beginning.

Let that self speak freely and without editing. Let them tell you what they now know that you are just beginning to remember, what they most want you to stop being afraid of, and what was waiting for you on the other side of the last breath, on the shore that was always, in every lifetime of rowing, uniquely and completely yours.

You do not need to know what will come before you begin. The primordial waters will tell you. They have always known, and they have always been speaking. You are finally quiet enough to hear them, at this threshold between the end of the zodiac and the beginning of a new era.

The voice could sound something like this:

"I am writing to you from solid ground, where your body can finally come to rest, and I want you to know that you are sitting in the sun right now. The sun is warm on your skin, and you are not doing anything, and no one needs anything from you, and you are at peace with that. You are not scanning the horizon for the next person to rescue. Your hands are open and resting in your lap, receiving the warmth, and it is enough, more than enough, it is everything. I need you to know that this is what was waiting for you: not an achievement, not a recognition, not a love that finally stayed... But this: your own hands, open, in the sun, belonging completely to yourself, full of everything the ocean was always carrying toward you, and you are finally, finally, able to receive it."

That is what the shore feels like. Yours will have its own shape, its own truth.

Begin with: "I’m writing to you from solid ground, where the body can finally come to rest, and I want you to know…” and let the waters carry you home.