November's New Moon

"A farewell to my shadow is not my death; it's my rebirth in darkness." -Munia Khan

We begin this month's moon cycle with the New Moon in Scorpio. We entered into Scorpio season on October 23rd and we will remain here until November 21st. Scorpio is a fixed water sign, meaning it asks us to go deep into our dreams and our primal desires. When we tap into this energy, it's like tapping into 250 million-year-old groundwater. We can drink from the energy that has always been present, and in so doing, we are replenished. Death is the 13th Major Arcana card in the Tarot and is aligned with the Zodiac sign of Scorpio.

In this card, we see the figure of death as a skeleton astride a white horse in full armor carrying a flag with a white rose. Like death, the color black absorbs all and like death, the color white as a prism includes all. Life and death are both eternal, and so it is only the ego that fears death. The ego imagines itself as a personality, somehow separate from all of life, and in that way, superior to the order of the universe. The Death card does not represent the moment of transformation and rebirth, but rather, the moment we surrender to change and give up the ego's fidelity at all costs to the "I" in our personas. It is true that transformation of the self at this stage will mean an egoic death, and will also mean rebirth into a greater fulfillment of our soul's true purpose. The biggest challenge is that the outcome of the rebirth is unseen. We see in The Light Seer's deck that Major 13 is renamed Death ∞ Rebirth.

It is not possible for any birth or rebirth to take place without death and it is not possible for any death to take place without a rebirth. When a baby is born, there is the death of a pregnancy and a post-partum experience of grief. Transformation and growth take place when what is ready to die away has long since been ready to go. After this recognition, the transformation can begin. I experienced the death of my father when I was 10 years old. At that age, I wasn't capable of contextualizing that loss. Unfortunately, our culture offers little to no space to talk about loss and grief at any age, and so I made sense of the loss without really processing it. I just moved on. It wasn't until I was in college that I got any insight as to what his death meant for me. One of my professors had a young daughter whose pet rabbit, the very symbol of rebirth, died.

She was just old enough to put together that if her rabbit died, then someday her parents would die, and someday she herself would die. We all experience this revelation at some point, but it was her father's retelling of his response that struck me so. He had her imagine all the things that she loved, from flowers to her bunny to her friends and family. He then invited her to feel that love as fully as possible. He then said to her, "If every living thing in creation that has been born into life will eventually die, can it be possible that death is an unloving part of creation?" I don't expect that many of you will be struck by the retelling of this simple revelation. It wasn't the content of the idea that helped me personally, but rather the fact that he was a father and that she had him alive to help her with this lesson, that touched me so profoundly. It was not my re