this is the balsamic moon bulletin: a wrap up of the previous lunar cycle and a preview of the lunar cycle ahead. I’m biased (was born during this phase) but the balsamic moon is my favorite part of the month. Just before the new moon, it’s a time for reflection, distillation and integration. It’s a few days where the best thing to do is creatively float and imagine while you also wash the floors, tidy the desk, do some laundry, and close out projects. But also: when all else fails, take a nap.
Hallo bb,
We’ve come to the end of 2023 and I’ve never felt more like a character in a Miranda July movie. Which is to say I’ve never felt more lonely while simultaneously so happy to experience all the mundanities of being alive. Perhaps this is just what it means to be in one’s mid 30’s, but I find myself in one moment struggling to find energy to see friends, but then in the next, filled with absolute delight when the guy who works the late shift at my laundromat passes me on the street and waves hello. “My friend!” I think, proudly, before heading right back to the couch. Flipping through Instagram stories, I glimpse a video of someone wearing a midi skirt over flared jeans with Frye boots and a plaid trench coat. Elsewhere in the digital abyss, I see a friend of a friend with an effortless Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail haircut. They’re at the Farmer’s Market experiencing life and I’m on my couch experiencing Instagram. “Time to make a Pinterest board of fashion inspo for 2024,” I think as I scroll. (I have never used Pinterest.) It’s been a weird year, right?
The New Moon in Sagittarius is on November 12 at 6:32 PM ET. This is the last New Moon of the year. New Moons are often quiet moments for setting intentions, but this one isn’t for journaling and restorative yoga by candlelight. This New Moon has teeth.
Falling at 20º Sagittarius, this New Moon has the devil-may-care bite that comes with the Northern Hemisphere’s darkest week of the year. Winter is coming. The third decan of Sagittarius is where we reach the end. Austin Coppock writes in 36 Faces, “those who walk this face must choose which burdens they will bear to the bitter end, and which are not worthy of such feats of will and endurance.” This part of the zodiac is where we live in a perpetual state of “one last push.” It’s last minute holiday gift shopping and college finals week and the chaos of the “Chrismukkah” episode of The O.C. My first astrology teacher Adam Elenbaas described Sagittarius as a place where we experience the duality of hedonism and “anhedonism,” or as I like to put it, the tremor between “going to the rave” and “wearing the argyle sweater.” It’s always one or the other with Sagittarius, and most often, it’s a little bit of both. To note: Adam Brody who played Seth Cohen, the original “hot nerd,” on The O.C. was born with the Sun in Sagittarius III. Sagittarius is where we burn the candle at both ends.
Because the third decan of Sagittarius is where we push ourselves across the finish line, it’s also where we see the future. Those born with placements in Sagittarius III are oracles and visionaries. Arthur C. Clarke who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey (both the original book and the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick) was born with the Sun in this part of the zodiac. On the BBC’s Horizon in 1964, Clarke presented a forecast for the next hundred years of humanity that anticipated smartphones, AI, 3D printing and telecommuting. Though his predictions do include robots one day outsmarting humans, he assures the audience that “even if the future does belong to the robots, our bodies and our brains still have immense untapped potentialities.” Clarke, who created 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL, says all of this with a flush of optimism. In true Sagittarius fashion, he’s not just curious about the future, but excited to take the journey there.
Another person with the Sun in Sagittarius III is Tom Delonge, the co-founder, co-lead vocalist and guitarist of Blink-182. Besides writing hits like “All the Small Things,” Delonge is also a passionate UFOlogist (yes that’s what it’s called!) who founded a company called To the Stars dedicated to promoting UFO and alien research. He quit Blink-182 in 2015 to pursue ufology full time. Delonge had to play the long game and weather many years of being called a wacko conspiracy theorist, but it seems that some of his theories are finally gaining some traction. In 2020, three videos of UFOs that Delonge had originally shared in 2017 were declassified by the Pentagon. Then in July 2023, while Delonge was back on tour with Blink-182, his name was dropped at the congressional UFO hearings. It’s been a long journey and it’s still ongoing, but Delonge is slowly convincing the world that, as he sang in a Blink-182 song from 1999, aliens exist.
Yet another person with the Sun in Sagittarius III is the recently crowned Time magazine Person of the Year, Taylor Alison Swift. Back in 2014—before she released her first full pop record 1989—Swift wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal with predictions for the future of the music industry in which she more or less foretells artists moving to subscription support from fans, Soundcloud fame, and her own future move to re-record and reclaim her own albums.
She writes, “I'd like to point out that people are still buying albums, but now they're buying just a few of them. They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart…” Here Swift isn’t just talking about the song itself but the entire world crafted around that song. She’s talking about the marketing campaign. What Swift, Delonge and Clarke have in common is the ability to remain optimistic while playing the. long game. Sagittarius III is less about the vision itself, and more about having the tenacity to execute it.
If the first part of Sagittarius is about setting out on a journey and the second part is about weathering the storm along the way, the third part is about carrying everything you learned back home. The third decan of Sagittarius is connected to the Tarot’s 10 of Wands. Pamela Colman Smith’s illustration for the 10 of Wands in the Rider Waite deck (see below) is, put simply, not cute.
The 10 of Wands depicts a man bearing the weight of 10 staffs. He’s at the end of his journey and poised to drop them. It’s often read as a breaking point after one has bitten off more than they can chew. In fact, the Golden Dawn called this card “Oppression.” Yikes! Pamela Colman-Smith used imagery from the Sola Busca Tarot (from Italy, the first known 78 card deck) as inspiration for the Rider Waite. For the 10 of Wands, she borrowed imagery not from a wands card though, but from Sola Busca’s 10 of Swords. The image used for the 10 of Wands in the Sola Busca tarot (see above) is very different. The wands aren’t being carried, but are bundled neatly like pens in a jar. The Sola Busca 10 of Wands is a completed story. A job well done. I think there’s something here for this New Moon — in this moment, is the point to struggle or to feel satisfied?
This New Moon in Sagittarius has both the dream (square to Neptune) and the drive (conjunct Mars.) The burden of having such a clear vision of the future is that no one will believe you unless you see it through. As I wrote at the top, it’s been a very long year. Getting where we want to go may seem impossible right now. But I think I speak for everyone when I say, what outweighs the heaviness is the desire to leave the past behind and start. This New Moon has us feeling more than that finals week crunch. It’s feeling like the final legs of The Odyssey. It’s a breaking point. It’s also a refusal. It’s also a passionate cry. There are no vague wishes on this New Moon. There is only deep and intentional spell casting.
So what can we do to make this moment feel less like a heavy burden, and more like that sweet feeling of a job well done? What T. Susan Chang refers to in 36 Secrets as “an epic victory to be immortalized in song and story.” When do we get to celebrate? That’s really the question. I think the answer is we have to keep going until we get there. What’s coming up at this New Moon is the spark that’s going to take us to the finish line.
To me, the most fascinating part of Taylor Swift’s Time Person of the Year Interview was not her continued rehashing of the Kanye drama and its subsequent toll, or the spilled tea on her relationship with Travis Kelce, it was the play-by-play of her training regimen for her Eras tour. Swift trained for months so when she was up on stage, she could just be in the moment.
“ ‘…Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,’ she says. ‘I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.’”
Getting to the future requires a lot of practice and a lot of patience. 35 turns into 40 and 40 turns into 50. Sometimes slowly and sometimes all at once. Time’s going to pass whether we want it to or not.
Less than 12 hours after this New Moon goes exact, Mercury stations retrograde until January 1st. The ultimate message of this New Moon is: “Not so fast. You have time.” I think there’s something here about the power of suggestion. Not just in what the world is suggesting at us (the algorithm, the FYP), but in what we’re suggesting to ourselves. There’s opportunity to be the 2024 style inspo we wish to see in the world. We’re ready to go, but we also have the time.
To the future!
xo,
Jaime
Paid subscribers, you’ll be getting your coming up this lunar cycle with short horoscopes for each sign on Wednesday — if you’re not yet a paid subscriber and want to get that in your inbox, join!
This week’s episode of good fortune! includes more musings on this week’s New Moon and the Mercury retrograde.
My books are open for December and January, and I have about five slots left for December before I take a holiday break December 22 - January 1. Now’s a great time to book and discuss what’s coming up for you in 2024.