New Moon in Virgo: The Fertile Void
Updated: 34 minutes ago
Virgo season has become synonymous with sorting and clearing: emptying cupboards, reorganizing shelves, and experiencing that almost euphoric satisfaction of finally tackling the infamous junk drawer.
But tidying is only the surface and beneath this desire to make space lies something deeper: a longing to recover the thread of our destiny.
As we accumulate objects, obligations, habits, other people’s expectations, we gradually lose sight of what is truly ours.
Decluttering then becomes a way of returning to what is essential, clearing enough space around us, and within us, to feel again what nourishes us and what is calling us.
This is the invitation of the Virgo New Moon: to look with discernment at what we allow into our lives, the food we eat, the work to which we give our energy, the people we surround ourselves with, the habits we cultivate, the objects with which we fill our homes.
Marie Kondo asks us to keep only what “sparks joy.” Virgo may be asking a more essential question:
Does this still nourish my life?
As I contemplated this New Moon, my eyes fell on the chair where I have an unfortunate habit of piling my clothes instead of putting them away.
For me, clutter has long been intimately connected with dissociation. Since childhood, I have been able to stop seeing what surrounds me, forget where I have put things, perform an action without truly registering it because some part of me simply isn’t there.
It's been a few years now that I have been practicing inhabiting my body more fully.
It happens through very small things: stopping halfway through a movement, feeling my feet, noticing what my hands are doing, reminding myself that I am here.
And that day, it meant picking up the clothes from that chair, folding them, and consciously putting them away.
I should say that returning to the body is not simply an exercise in presence.
There is always plenty of reasons why we learnt to dissociate and leave our body.
Coming home to the body can overwhelming, because we encounter what we had to keep at a distance in order to carry on: emotions we could not afford to feel, pain and tension in the body, parts of ourselves we left behind along the way.
What is not felt does not simply disappear. It may infuse into our relationships, be carried by those close to us, travel elsewhere in our family, or find expression through the body.
And as I folded my T-shirt, I found myself thinking about the almost holographic nature of the gesture.
Caring for our living space, our body and our mind - each level seems to mirror the others. When we restore order in one place, something elsewhere may begin to find its own order too.
Perhaps this is how we slowly recover the thread: by clearing what obstructs us, tending what shelters us, and creating enough space to hear what, beneath all the noise, is trying to guide us.
This path can be surprisingly joyful.
As I folded the T-shirt I had left on the chair, I thought of all the beings who had made possible the simple privilege of wearing it: The cotton had grown somewhere. There had been soil, water, sunlight. Hands had harvested it, processed it, spun it, dyed it, cut it, sewn it, transported it. A multitude of lives and gestures were invisibly woven into an object so ordinary that I could toss it carelessly onto a chair.
So I folded it with care. And in that very simple gesture, silently thanking all those who had taken part in its journey to me, something changed.
Tidying was no longer a chore.
There was gratitude in it, and with gratitude came an unexpected lightness and joy.
The same is true of food.
We can peel a potato and remember the earth in which it grew. We can taste a grain of basmati rice and imagine, for a moment, the immense journey that brought it to our bowl: the soil, the rain, the sun, the people who grew and harvested it, those who prepared it, transported it, sold it.
When you really think about it, even a bowl of rice becomes extraordinary.
Perhaps this is where care begins: in recovering, behind the most ordinary things, an awareness of everything that made their presence possible, and allowing that awareness to transform the way we receive them, use them, and care for them.
This kind of attention subtly changes our relationship with things.
We begin to notice not only what we possess, but how we live with it: what we choose to keep close, what we tend, and what it may be time to release.
Perhaps clearing our space begins here: by bringing greater consciousness to what we choose to keep.
I began to contemplate this through four spaces we inhabit: our home, our body, our mind, and our soul.
I. Our Home
Look around and ask yourself: What surrounds me?
The pile beside the door that I no longer even see, the drawer I quickly close so I don’t have to look inside, the inbox with thousands of unread messages, the calendar overcrowded with obligations, the cupboard full of things I haven’t touched in years, the clothes belonging to a person I no longer am.
A space can support the nervous system, or continually tax it. Objects ask something of our attention even when we have grown so accustomed to them that we no longer consciously notice them.
And sometimes clutter is more than procrastination, sometimes it is attachment made visible.
The dress we cannot bring ourselves to part with even though we haven’t worn it since 2013. The box we have carried through three house moves without ever opening it. The object that belonged to someone we lost. The belongings of a former identity, waiting patiently for us to admit that we are never going back.
This is why sorting through our possessions can stir such powerful emotions.
We are not always simply deciding whether to keep an object.
Sometimes we are deciding whether we are ready to let go of the version of ourselves attached to it.
A home is more than a collection of rooms and possessions.
It is a nest.
We arrange objects around ourselves to create familiarity, safety, continuity, a sense of belonging. Photographs, books, blankets, inherited furniture and those strange little objects that would mean nothing to anyone else tell us:
This is where I live. This is who I am. This is where I am safe.
Our homes become an outer skin of the psyche.
Some people are naturally untidy. Organization can become difficult during grief, depression, exhaustion or overwhelm, or simply because our brains do not all organize attention in the same way.
Compulsive hoarding is a genuine pathology, not merely an extreme form of messiness. This distinction matters because our culture so often treats clutter as a moral failing.
Virgo has its shadow here too: discernment can so easily become judgement.
So instead of beginning with Why can’t I get rid of this?, perhaps we can become curious about what keeping these things is doing for us.
After loss, possessions can become anchors of continuity.
An object can carry a memory, a possibility, an identity, a sense of safety, a bond with someone who is no longer here.
I might need this later
This reminds me that this part of my life really happened.
If I let this go, what else am I losing?
There is nothing pathological about making a nest. The difficulty begins when the nest becomes so fortified that there is no longer enough room to live inside it.
Sometimes what began as protection eventually becomes confinement.
Virgo is not asking us to destroy the nest. She is asking us to tend it and to notice what is still alive and meaningful, and what has become dead matter.
So the question is not:
What can I get rid of?
But:
Does this still belong to the person I am becoming?
The purpose of clearing is not to create emptiness, it is to make room for life.
II. Our Body
What am I absorbing? What am I digesting? What am I carrying?
The body lives through rhythms of absorption, assimilation and elimination.
We breathe in and breathe out. We eat, digest, absorb and eliminate. We move between activation and rest. Health depends not only upon our capacity to receive, but also upon our ability to distinguish what can nourish us from what simply needs to pass through.
Emotionally, we absorb experiences, expectations, information and other people’s emotions. Some become part of us, some need time to be metabolized, and some were never ours to carry.
What has not yet been integrated may linger in the body: a clenched jaw, held breath, shoulders still carrying the weight of the world, a nervous system that has not yet received the message that the danger has passed.
The intelligence of the body asks for discernment.
What truly nourishes me?
What weighs me down?
Where am I still holding tension?
What is my body trying to tell me?
What am I still carrying that was never mine to carry?
III. The Mind
The third space may be the hardest to clear, because mental clutter rarely presents itself as clutter.
It often looks remarkably respectable. The more we know, the better!
And so we replay yesterday’s conversation, searching for what we should have said. Rehearse tomorrow’s, trying to control what hasn’t happened yet. Explore one more possibility. Read one more article. Listen to one more podcast...
Virgo’s gift is discernment: that extraordinary ability to distinguish one thing from another, to name, organize, analyze and refine in order to make the wisest choice.
However, every gift casts a shadow: discernment can become criticism, analysis can become hypervigilance, and self-development can become the conviction that there must always be something wrong with me that needs fixing.
Sometimes the mind keeps moving precisely because it is afraid of what might happen if it became quiet. Beneath all that useful-looking mental activity lies uncomfortable territory where there is no problem to solve and no conversation to rehearse. Only silence.
So rather than demanding that the mind stop thinking (yet another impossible self-improvement project!) perhaps we can simply say:
Thank you for working so hard. But you are allowed to rest too. Are these thousands of thoughts truly useful right now? Is this really where I want to spend my energy?
And then ask:
What truly deserves my attention?
Because our attention is one of the most precious gifts we possess.
At any moment, we can choose where to place it.
We can look away from the screen for a moment and notice the tree outside the window. Rest our eyes on a plant or a flower and simply thank it for being there.
Or perhaps go and gratefully fold that jumper that has been living on the chair for the past three weeks. :-)
IV. The Soul
What becomes alive when there is finally space?
We do not clear our homes, care for our bodies and quiet our minds simply to become more productive. We make room to recover our rightful place, to inhabit a life aligned with who we are.
There is something almost monastic about Virgo. Her archetype is the priestess tending the temple.
The Latin virgo gives us the word virgin, but archetypally virginity does not mean chastity. It can mean belonging to oneself–sovereignty.
Virgo knows what belongs within the sanctuary and what does not.
The work is to create enough silence to hear what is essential.
Human beings have always created rituals for this.
Across many traditions, rites of passage have involved fasting, seclusion, prayer, sweating, purification, ordeal, or periods of solitude in nature. These traditions differ profoundly from one another, but they share an ancient understanding:
To become, we must be willing to shed a skin.
The initiate relinquishes food, comfort, possessions, distractions, social roles and the familiar structures through which they recognise themselves. They cross a threshold and, for a time, stand without the usual scaffolding of identity.
Who am I when the things I used to define myself are no longer there?
This is why fasting, pilgrimage, solitude and purification appear again and again across different traditions.
We strip away an identity, a defence, an old allegiance, a story about the person we believed ourselves to be. And when enough masks have fallen, another question can finally be heard:
What am I truly here to live?
Not “life purpose” as another performance, but the possibility of hearing Life itself whisper through the armour cracked open by our ordeals:
What is asking to be lived through me?
This is what rites of passage once helped us hear.
Modern Western culture has no rituals to carry us through the great thresholds of life: grief, divorce, illness, the loss of a job, a move from one home or country to another.
We cross into another life, yet nothing marks the crossing.
And without ritual, some part of us may remain loyal to an identity that life has already asked us to leave behind.
Perhaps this is why great transitions so often awaken an instinct to clear things out, as though we were unconsciously trying to create the ritual ourselves.
We cut our hair, empty our wardrobes, rearrange the house, give away our possessions, fast, travel alone, go walk in the forest.
The psyche understands something the rational mind has forgotten:
A new life needs space.
And so the question is no longer:
What should I throw away?
It becomes:
What is occupying the space that belongs to my soul?
The Virgo–Pisces Axis
This dialogue between Virgo and Pisces is written powerfully into the sky of this New Moon.
Mercury, ruler of Virgo, forms a Grand Air Trine with Uranus and Pluto while opposing Neptune, which sextiles both Uranus and Pluto, forming a Kite.
There is tremendous mental electricity here : Mercury expresses, Uranus awakens, Pluto penetrates. Together, they can break open our patterns of thinking and reveal what we could not see before.
But Neptune stands opposite Mercury. Neptune dissolves the boundaries Mercury depends upon. Neptune speaks through dreams, symbols, intuition and imagination, but also through projection, and fantasy. This makes Virgo’s discernment essential: What comes from my intuition? What comes from my fear?
We tend to imagine structure and surrender as opposites. We associate boundaries and form with restriction, while freedom appears limitless and uncontained.
But art tells us otherwise. I think of my Japanese calligraphy classes, where I discovered how much an apparently simple gesture can reveal about our inner state.
My teacher would watch the way I laid the ink on the paper and kept telling me I was using far too much! My brushstrokes were too thick. From that alone, she could tell me about the state of my spleen according to Chinese medicine. “Damp spleen!” she would say, laughing.
In calligraphy, you cannot endlessly return to a stroke and correct it. You prepare the ink, hold the brush, find the right amount, and then you make the stroke and allow it to be what it is.
You may know your technique perfectly, but once water meets pigment and paper, part of what happens is beyond your control.
This is where Virgo and Pisces meet.
Virgo prepares the vessel, refines the gesture, learns to discern the right measure.
Then Pisces asks us to let the water do its work.
Structure does not diminish mystery.
It gives mystery somewhere to happen.
Perhaps the invitation of this Virgo New Moon is simply this:
Make space, create a fertile void, so the mystery can unfold.
Like the darkness of the womb, a fertile void is the place where something not yet visible is preparing to be born.
And so we clear our homes to let in more light.
We care for our bodies.
We choose with discernment what nourishes our minds.
And then we wait. Without demanding to know what comes next, we leave the door open to the soul, so that it may inhabit our body and our life more fully.
When our home, our body, our mind and our soul come into alignment, we may begin to find the thread again, the one that has been leading us towards our destiny all along.
To bring this reflection into practice, here is a ritual to accompany you through the next lunar cycle.
New Moon Ritual
Choose a small space in your home: a shelf, the corner of a table, part of your desk or bedside table.
Empty it completely and take each object in your hands and ask:
Does this still belong to the person I am becoming?
Whatever receives a genuine yes can stay.
Give away, move, or release whatever receives a no.
Then deliberately leave part of that space completely empty.
Sit before the emptiness for a few moments.
Feel your feet, your breath, your body.
Then ask yourself:
What is still occupying a space within me that no longer belongs to it?
Write whatever arises on a small piece of paper.
Turn it over and simply write:
I return this space to Life.
Leave the paper in the empty space for the entire lunar cycle, until the next New Moon, place nothing else there.
Each time you pass that empty space, notice any impulse to fill it.
Simply remind yourself:
I do not yet know what belongs here.
Do not immediately search for what should come next.
Do not replace the old identity with a new one.
Do not turn the emptiness into another project.
Let the space breathe.
Watch what happens within you as the Moon waxes, becomes full, and wanes again. Perhaps, during the month, something will emerge: a desire, a knowing, an encounter, an idea, a change of direction.
Do not rush to give it form.
Virgo has prepared the vessel.
Pisces lets the mystery do its work.
At the following New Moon, return to the empty space.
And ask:
What is asking to take its place in my life now?
Perhaps you will know what belongs there.
Perhaps you will choose to leave it empty a little longer.
Because the ritual is not about filling the space but about becoming quiet enough to recognize what is truly worthy of inhabiting it.
Wishing you a beautiful New Moon!
May the space you create open the way to endless possibilities.
A final note of gratitude to my Japanese calligraphy teacher, MiaSan, whose artwork illustrates this article. More than twenty years later, her teaching still stays with me.
Comments