Happy New Moon, dear earth-dancers! It seems that again is a more magical word than I ever realized.
As my next book, The Cycles of Becoming, has been finding its voice through me, I’ve been in a state of deep appreciation for how truly wondrous life is. And lately I’ve been exploring something I thought I understood perfectly well: recurrence.
Something happens. Then something happens again. Simple enough.
Except apparently again is not a simple word in a becoming cosmos.
Today’s New Moon at 18° Virgo offers a beautiful example. The lunar phases recur through a synodic cycle of approximately 29.5 days. New Moon follows New Moon, each one traditionally inviting us to plant seeds and cultivate new beginnings.
And yet, no New Moon ever actually returns us to the same place.
Each recurrence occurs within a unique sky, a changing world, and a you who has been altered by everything you have lived since the previous cycle.
Something can come around again without anything actually being the same.
The Many Faces of Recurrence
Apparently, “again” has quite the wardrobe.
Sometimes recurrence appears as a cycle, a patterned recurrence generated by an underlying process. Lunar phases, planetary returns, seasons, circadian rhythms and tides belong here. The recurrence is intrinsic to the system.
Sometimes it appears as an episode. Something recognizable happens again, but without an obvious periodic rhythm. You get the flu. This has happened before is clear. This happens every X interval is not. There is recognizability without predictable timing.
Then there are patterns, where what recurs may not be an event at all but an underlying organization. Like when I repeatedly respond in a particular way when someone raises their voice at me. Or when I choose relationships that evoke a familiar dynamic. Or when uncertainty repeatedly activates my desire to control. The circumstances can be entirely different while the underlying organization remains surprisingly familiar.
And then we have the loop, that particularly industrious form of recurrence in which our response helps regenerate the conditions for the recurrence itself. A loop doesn't merely happen again. A loop recruits.
Finally, there is the echo. Something occurring now reverberates with something that occurred before without actually repeating it. A smell. A place. A tone of voice. A bodily sensation. Déjà vu. The present moment is genuinely new, yet something from the past suddenly becomes present within it.
And, just to keep things interesting, these forms of recurrence aren't standing politely in separate checkout lines waiting for their turn. Many dances are taking place simultaneously. A planetary cycle can intersect a psychological trigger that activates a pattern that sets in motion a relational loop that generates an embodied episode that echoes an earlier experience.
Whew.
And several different cycles can converge upon the same moment. This is one reason astrology becomes considerably more interesting than Saturn is transiting my Venus, therefore X. A field of possibility is populated by other fields of possibility.
Astrology gives us an exquisitely developed language for noticing recurrence in the heavens. But our participation with those cycles asks a much more interesting question: What does recurrence mean inside a living system that is itself becoming?
A chart for any event expands what we are able to notice. Yet, the lived event expands what we understand the chart can mean.
For example, something from the past reverberates. The old organization recognizes it. The familiar loop becomes available. But something else may be available now, too. Thank you, but no more.
The echo can sound without becoming a loop. The past can knock at the door without being handed the keys to dance with us again.
Who Meets the Recurrence?
Imagine, for example, that you have a recurring dream. You can't determine when it will recur. You can't control exactly which thoughts or memories will arise when you awaken. You can't decree what sensations will move through your body. And you may not even control your first response. The body can be halfway down the road before consciousness finds its slippers.
But we can become increasingly available to participate consciously with what arises. That's an earth-dancer discovering that whatever Life sends can be allowed through the door without either barricading the entrance or surrendering the house.
Agency without control; receptivity without passivity.
Perhaps that is one of the great gifts hidden inside recurrence. The recurrence participates in producing the new being who encounters the next recurrence. We meet something. We respond. We learn. We reorganize. We develop capacities that weren't available before.
Then something comes around again. But we have become. Ahhh, what a lovely possibility: recurrence may be one of becoming’s tools.
The Sky at This New Moon
And look at the particular sky in which this recurrence is occurring.
Virgo thrives on grounding us firmly here on Gaia and getting into the mucky muck of embodied life to discover what makes things tick. And in the hours leading to this New Moon, something rather extraordinary is happening: Mercury and Venus have both crossed thresholds into new signs.
Mercury, ruler of this Virgo New Moon, has just entered 0° Libra. Venus has just entered 0° Scorpio, a significant threshold in her coming retrograde cycle. Apparently the cosmos has decided subtlety is overrated.
While I’m writing a book about recurrence, Venus is beginning a journey through territory she will soon encounter again, while Mercury is preparing for an extended dance with RE in many of its forms: reconsider, revisit, remember, reorganize, revise, reset, recalibrate, reimagine.
It seems we may all be getting our shaman on this fall.
This makes Virgo, Libra and Scorpio especially interesting fields of participation over the coming months. Virgo asks us to become more skillful participants in our own embodied lives: supporting our physical bodies as they metabolize the many experiences and energies moving through us each day, while becoming increasingly discerning about what resonates with us, what supports our vitality, and what does not.
As we become more available within our own dance, we carry that developing capacity into our dance with others through Libra and into the deeper intimacy and transformation symbolized by Scorpio. Not as three separate assignments from the celestial homework department but as interacting fields of becoming.
The Invitation of Again
So perhaps this Virgo New Moon offers us a different way to approach the familiar ritual of planting seeds for something new. We might also turn toward what has come around again.
The relationship. The feeling. The opportunity. The fear. The dream. The circumstance we could swear Life already put on the syllabus three semesters ago. And instead of asking, Why is this happening again? we might become curious: Who am I now who wasn't available to meet this recurrence before?
What capacity has become available at this turn of the spiral that wasn't available at the last one? What part of me still recognizes this experience? What echo is sounding? What loop no longer needs to repeat itself? And what genuinely new response has become possible?
Because how lovely that Life doesn't bring us back simply to repeat. Instead recurrence is one of the ways becoming discovers what has become possible.
Again arrives. Something remembers. Something recognizes. Something responds. And sometimes, right there in the middle of what looks remarkably familiar, our awareness opens a door that wasn't there before.
As we enter this new season of becoming, may we become increasingly curious about the strange magic of Again. May we recognize what no longer needs our participation.
May we welcome capacities that could only have been cultivated through everything we have already lived.
And may we fall ever more deeply in love with the becoming earth-dancer who is here now, meeting a cosmos that is becoming too.
Again?
Yes.
Again arrives, but it doesn't merely reveal who we have become. It gives us an opportunity to become further through the encounter. That's subtly different from, I'm different now, so I'll respond differently. The recurrence itself participates in the next becoming.
It’s never quite the same dance. The recurrence participates in producing the new being who encounters the next recurrence. To that I hear a resounding and empowering YES! from the Possibilitarian within us all.