May 2023 Full Moon Lunar Eclipse
Friday, May 5th
Full Moon
Lunar Eclipse
in Scorpio 14°58'
10:33 am PT
Regeneration Moon: Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio by Alice Sparkly Kat
This Scorpio Moon is a slow-moving Moon. It’s a Moon in fall. This Lunar Eclipse is in reception with a Cancer Mars that’s hovering just out of bounds. Venus, too, spins in Gemini far out of the Sun’s ecliptic.
Sometimes, a Scorpio Moon is typecast as a volatile Moon. Sometimes, Cancer Mars is typecast as a fumbling Mars. What happens when beautiful sensation meets necessary hesitancy? What happens when you are able to feel more in a minute than you could possibly express?
A planet in fall is a planet that needs help. It’s a planet that learns how to ask for help. It’s a planet that, in learning how to ask for help, also learns how to grow.
There are things that happen in our bodies when we are faced with something that we have learned to classify as a problem—when we are faced with an angry friend or with a frustrated lover when we feel rejected or villainized or unwanted. We sometimes avoid problems; we sometimes try to solve them; we sometimes try to solve problems precisely because we avoid them.
Solving problems without slowness and regeneration can look and feel like dancing around the issue to find the most necessary compromise. It can look like saying the things that will make us look and feel the most “good,” whatever that means. It can look and feel like purposely angering a person over a separate topic because the inciting incident is too painful to be with.
Regeneration doesn’t try to solve the problem. Regeneration is about moving on and moving forward— about knowing when life keeps going. It’s about knowing the parts of life that still feel safe and joyful despite the problem. It’s about noticing what parts of ourselves need the most from us. It’s about figuring out how those demands show up, and also how we might hold them, how we might help them.
An angry friend might make us notice that the part of us that tries too hard to be “good” is overworked, that it’s exhausted. It might make us notice that there’s another piece of us and that piece of us, the one that needs time instead of solutions, is desperate to be understood. A frustrated lover might provoke us to notice shame that has attempted to manage rejection for us for our entire lives.
There’s a hard callus that surrounds my heart. I earned this callus: it contains so many things that make me who I am. Within that callus is a spark that desperately wants to connect. The callus—being hyper-aware of that spark—cringes away from rejection.
It might be enough to say “I see what you’ve been trying to do for me.” It might be enough to say “There’s a part of me that wants to be understood.”
You see, nothing changes when we try to force change.
— Excerpt from the 2023 Many Moons Lunar Planner. To read Alice Sparkly Kat's exclusive, reflection prompts for this Scorpio Full Moon Lunar Eclipse, get your copy of Many Moons 2023. The benefit edition is here. The digital edition is here.
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Alice Sparkly Kat is an astrologer. They use astrology to re-chart a history of the subconscious, redefine the body in world, and reimagine history as collective memory. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Brooklyn Museum. They’re the author of Postcolonial Astrology (May 2021). Learn more at www.alicesparklykat.com