By Amanda Moreno

This week several friends gave me suggestions as to what they thought I should write about. As diverse as the topics have been, they seem to fall under the umbrella of reality versus fiction, or a pervading sense of surreality and dreaminess, at the same time as the concerns of the physical realm have become emphasized.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

To try to combine them in a cohesive framework, I set out for the Planet Waves main page to see what my colleagues had to say about the astrology of the moment. The title of the weekly subscribers’ issue pretty much says it all: What is Real and What is Not. Of course! We’re in Pisces-Virgo Full Moon season.

One of the friends I consulted suggested via text that I write about love in the digital age. Having recently re-entered the dating pool, he has been trying out various online ‘dating’ platforms. His words to me were, “Like…what is intentionality in this realm?”

He then sent me a bunch of emoticons that pretty aptly expressed his experience: excitement at all the options, the ease of hitting up his phone and the apps on it, the sense of fishing for something…and then…silence…no contact…just emptiness. A shadow.

I myself have a kinda-mildly-like-it-as-a-necessary-evil / totally-hate-it relationship with online dating. I’ve actually met some remarkable people and had some really fulfilling relationships come out of those meetings. I’ve also become increasingly jaded and tend to deactivate my accounts regularly.

For me, it’s very much about the “what is real, what is not?” question. Often I’ll receive a message that makes it clear within a few lines that the person has projected all kinds of forevers and hopes and dreams onto the pictures they saw of me and the profile I’ve written. I find myself annoyed, thinking but you haven’t even met me! You don’t even know me!

I’d rather meet people to date in the wild, but that seems so rare. There’s also the fact that online dating is yet another vortex to get sucked into when avoiding the fact that shit seems to be going down in the world at a far more rapid pace than we ever dreamed imaginable.

Which brings me to another conversation I had today. A friend was commenting on her observation that many people seem to be hanging on for dear life these days. More specifically, she pointed out that even those who thought they were prepared or preparing for the magnitude of the transformation we’re facing seem to be finding themselves a bit caught off guard and shocked that all of it is actually happening in real time.

We’re here! Ecological tipping points are being reached, small towns in California are finding themselves without water, racial tensions are rising, genocide continues, the ecosystem is collapsing, Donald Trump is gaining in the polls…things seem to be accelerating at a rate that can make it very difficult to get our bearings in time and space, especially on top of personal emotional upheaval. There it is again — surreality.

I loved seeing that Len wrote about the current astrology in terms of a rite of passage. Using that kind of terminology is helpful in that it gives us a concept to work with that provides a framework we can navigate within. A rite of passage is an event or process that marks the transition between one stage of life and another. On the collective level, it is marking the transition from one paradigm to another.

During a rite of passage or vision quest there is often a core fear that is faced. This movement creates tension as we move from one identity to another. The tension generates creative energy that allows a new facet of our identity to emerge, bringing something new into the world.

Eric describes Jupiter in Virgo as a nice description of the initiation of that creative process, which is something we can use as a catalyst for change. When taken in the context of rite-of-passage astrology, what comes to mind for me is the potential for bringing the Piscean fantasy down into the material world, hopefully by the initiation of a Virgoan creative process.

What does that mean? A creative process that is embodied, practical and rooted in intention. Hopefully an intention to serve — be that serving the greater good or just a specific purpose in our personal lives. In other words, what fantasies or dreams can serve us moving forward?

In my own life, I have been noticing the surreality in many ways. I have been watching documentaries such as The Human Experiment or Frontline’s episodes about government spying and “nightmare” bacteria. At the same time, the skies over Seattle have been this eerie, apocalyptic yellow due to the fires burning all over the state. Sewage spills in the lake have closed beaches. The Olympic Mountains, home to our state’s rainforest, are at 3% of their normal rainfall. I could go on.

As everything seems to be speeding up and getting more surreal, however, I’ve been coming home into my body and truly anchoring into my life. Through continued dietary change and lots of learning about the connection between the gut and the brain, I’ve been making a commitment to being here. I feel grounded and centered, even though deeply emotional content continues to arise. I am aware that whatever new identity is coming to the surface, it is more committed, more secure and more aware that we have to change our cultural conditioning towards acceptable ways of living immediately, and that I have to exist in a way that embodies that knowing. It’s an intense awareness, but the calm I feel is surreal.

The Virgo-Pisces axis is so fascinating to me because it speaks to the need for intentional commitment to some kind of practical service at the same time as it reminds us that we have to let go and that nothing is permanent. I find myself in a space where I am focusing on health and achieving goals at the same time as I have invited the universe to guide me, knowing that at any time my ideas of where I’m heading might need to shift. I am trying to accomplish at the same time as I am surrendering.

I’m reminded of a class I took in grad school about the life of Carl Jung and the spiritual crisis of our times. For part of the final assignment we had to create four mandalas, each of which was representative of some part of our spirituality. The fourth mandala was to represent our ideal spiritual vision for our lives.

I am a horrible visual artist, but really got into the project. For this fourth image I wanted to paint the circle of the mandala nestled within a tree. I was so looking forward to painting each individual leaf, as I was working with the Virgo-Pisces axis a lot at that point in my life, and individual leaf painting felt like a pretty epic Virgo activity.

About a third of the way through I realized I hated what I was creating. I had drawn the trunk and stems of the tree and then began the leaves and it looked ridiculous. The colors were all wrong, and it was quite clear that I was not going to be able to make the image in my head translate to the canvas. I felt anxious and then angry. I dabbed my paintbrush into a glob of paint, self-critical scripts all pumping in my brain, and then began to mindlessly blot out all of the leaves, knowing the painting was ruined.

About three minutes into my furious blotting and dabbing a funny thing happened. I realized I was filling the tree in with leaves — but leaves that looked completely different from what I had intended. The shape and textures and color variations created the image of the tree without need for each individual leaf being painted. I started laughing and realized I had just followed the flow right back into Pisces, giving up and surrendering my vision and ending up with what I had wanted anyway. I’d simply gotten there a different way.

The Virgo energy is integral to our ability to discern what is real and what is not, and to bring the fantasy into reality. We have faced so many of these catalysts for change in recent years, and from my point of view now we are being called to step out and consciously co-create a new world. Even at the most subtle levels or with small steps, and using discernment as to what steps make sense, we can allow space for the divine to come through, inviting it to guide the way. Using the blend of Virgo and Pisces, we can tap into creative intent, becoming a catalyst for change at whatever level responds.