Language as a Martial Art
Virgo New Moon | Saturday 8.27.22 | 3:17am
A new moon always signals the peace of the fertile void, but none so much as a Virgo new moon, wherein we recall how to anchor into ourselves as the pathway toward serving something larger. It has been a long summer full of humbling and transformative ego work. This new moon calls us inward for rituals of harvesting all we’ve learned and created in the past season. Virgo thrives with intention, methodical devotion, and order, so our baseline here is creating or honoring practices that firmly root our recently learned lessons and refined values into our daily lives.
Ironically, this Virgo moon’s tightest formation is a square to the scrappy chaos magic of Mars in Gemini. These two —chaos and order— may feel at odds, and this weekend may seem like any other when we are tasked with wrangling opposing energies into some form of togetherness. However this event actually foreshadows a denser series of events that will shape the entire fall and winter, and thus gives us an opportunity to set longer-term intentions for integration.
The foreshadowing began last week when Mars entered Gemini on august 20. While Mars usually zips through a zodiac sign in 2 months, the warrior has arrived here for a 7-month stay due to its upcoming retrograde (oct. 30 - jan. 12). Mars’ retrograde is a semi-rare event. Only occurring ever other year, it provocatively transforms our creative energies via these questions: what do you fight for? Why do you fight for it? How do you fight for it?
The tense square between Mars and this weekend’s new moon make this a potent time for cultivating intention and dedication as we prepare for the energetic renovations of this winter’s Mars retrograde. Due to a heavily mercurial set of energies (Virgo moon, Gemini Mars), the most pressing task now is to get present with how you use language to navigate, shape, and cut through yours and others’ experiences —and remember that language is not just words: there are languages of music, the aesthetic, touch, and beyond. Whatever languages you chooses, remember that language is the vehicle we use to move and share our experiences. It is how we connect. Brene Brown calls language “the greatest human portal that we have.” It helps us map our experiences toward or away from one another. It creates the frameworks through which we learn to respect or devalue one another.
With Gemini and Virgo so activated, we want to look to Mercury, who has just arrived in Libra’s connective terrain, and is also preparing to turn retrograde on sept. 9. This indicates that the best use of our language is exactly what you might expect: to ask questions that deepen relationality, cultivate balance and pleasure, and to honor peace and connection.
Mars however will never forget how much it likes to fight, differentiate, and separate. So when we integrate Libran and Martial energies, we the martial arts. In the martial arts of language, we can find this formula: language becomes the tool we use to both identify and respect our differences, and then it becomes the tool by which we build bridges across our differences. The fighter Mars can become a peacekeeper.
During this new moon, what if we spend time learning how to say no to language and categories that don’t fit anymore? What if we try on new, more creative words to describe our selves, our differences, and to determine how we are alike and unalike to each other? What if we can sharpen the language we use without using it as a weapon against each other? What if we cut apart the categories we’ve previously known so we can create new ways of identifying ourselves? What if we create new grammars that help us move through our concepts of the world differently than we have ever been taught to do?