We are deep in the force field of tomorrow afternoon’s powerful Taurus Moon (3:49 pm EDT).  This weekend has brought a dramatic shift in energies, as the volatile yang vibrations of fire and air came whirling into a yin sky, full of earth and water.   Venus’ and Mercury add to the heat as Venus enters Libra—and your 12^th House—tonight, and Mercury moves into the Sagittarius portion of your 2^nd House tomorrow.   As Mars and Jupiter move into exact opposition, a stormy cosmos becomes even more volatile.  This is a sky full of potential overall for over-heating and melting down—and also for breakthrough. 

Zone of Power:  The Energy Field of Scorpio-Taurus Full Moon

This Full Moon is a threshold, coming two days before the ancient sacred holiday of Samhain, the original Halloween.  Marking the halfway point between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice, Samhain ushers in the cycle of dying light that precedes the Winter Solstice.  We enter an accelerating darkness as we let the old skins slip away, so that we will be able to receive the growing light—the light that follows the deepest darkness—that the Solstice brings.

It is a lunation full of power. The Taurus Full Moon is Gaia’s own, and we’re all watching an extraordinary manifestation of Mother Earth’s potency as a great storm of sea and earth gathers off the U.S. coast.  As big as an entire region of our enormous country, the storm is expected to make landfall less than 24 hours after the moon is full at 3:49 p.m. EDT on Monday.  Dozens are already dead in Sandy’s wake, and more destruction lies ahead. Its effects are likely to extend far beyond those who will bear the direct brunt of its massive winds, rain, floods, snow, and ice.  For example, it’s very likely that this monstrous storm will leave many millions without power on Election Day.  

Hurricane Isaac, heading for New Orleans almost exactly three months ago.

It’s possible that this storm could bring something unprecedented, something entirely new —the moment we understand on a very visceral level our profound interconnection.  The moment that hundreds of millions of people can experience the truth spoken by sages throughout time:  Whatever happens to one of us, happens to all of us.  With Luna in Taurus, this awareness will be experienced not only by the mind, but by the total organism.  With Pluto strongly supporting Luna by trine, it will be extremely powerful.

Breaking Down & Breaking Through

Such a moment would be a monumental example of the concept of “breakdown as breakthrough”—a concept all too familiar to recovering addicts to sugar, alcohol, work, narcotics, and overconsumption.  This breakdown (to which our collective addiction to a petroleum-based lifestyle is a major contributing factor) would break through the compartmentalization that allows us to survive in a world full of increasingly crippling dysfunction.  It would break through the denial that we all use when we feel compassion for others’ suffering and relief that we are not directly affected, or when we fail to experience the realities we are part of.  This storm could bring us to the moment where we understand—or begin to–on a very visceral level that inter-connection and inter-dependence are not just concepts. They are our shared human reality.  In a country—and a world—more deeply divided, it is hard to imagine a more transformative breakdown than one that takes down the illusion that the problem lies not with “us” but with “them.”  

If such a breakthrough occurs, it’s not likely to be in an instant.  It’s likely to happen as all breakthroughs do, beginning with the one that propelled us into life on earth.  Birth is the end of what is a long, often agonizing, and utterly transforming experience.  And in all high-order breakthroughs, a vision of the outcome can be the difference in making it and not making it.

 At the Ancestral Well

The symbol for the degree in which this Moon falls points to the possiblity of just such a transformative  outcome:  “The woman of Samaria at the ancestral well.”  In his commentary on this symbol, the great Dane Rudhyar noted that the Samarians were a tribe despised by the Jews, and that the unmarried woman at the well lived in every way at the social margins.  Yet it was to her that Jesus first uttered in words his true cosmic identity.  

“The creative future descends first to that which has become chaos,” Rudhyar goes on to say. ” An old order is never open to a new Revelation until it has accepted disorder in the name of that Power which subsumes all forms of order–Love. . . . A new quality of being is revealed which renders old patterns obsolete” (boldface italics mine).

It’s also significant that the woman of Samaria is offering water from “the ancestral well.”  This is the well that takes us deep into time, to the life-giving waters that have nourished ancestors known and unknown to us.  These can be literal ancestors and also spiritual ancestors.  The energy at the Nadir of our birth charts—the deepest and most private point in our inner cosmos—is where this well can be found.  Here are the roots that make connection with the Deep Time.  Here is where life can be renewed, and we can find the direction of the sustainable future.  It’s a future nourished and sustained by an ancient wisdom deeper than our frenetic 21^st-century culture recognizes.  It’s an Ancient Future, enlivened with the incomparable power of Now.

How these energies will play out in time and space remains to be seen.  And it may take some time.  It’s very significant that Mercury stations retrograde Tuesday evening, November 6.  Since Friday, October 19 the Cosmic Messenger has been in the retrograde shadow zone.  That’s where  he will vision quest from November 6 through 26th.  He’ll be looking for the information we’ve overlooked, ignored, or lost–the things we need to know.  The clues are in the shadow zone

There is much we do not know and much that will be revealed.  What’s most important now is to seek the ancestral well, open our hearts and minds, and pay attention.