Belated Musings: Soup of the Scorpio Full Moon Lunar Eclipse

It’s been a few days since I was awoken at 8am by my neighbour loudly cutting down a dainty  6ft lime-green fir tree from his front garden. It had suffered from the change in weather we had a month ago, and was browning, and the night before I’d heard him arguing with his wife, begging her to see that it wasn’t dying, that it was pointless to remove it from their lives.

‘I don’t care! I want it gone! I want it gone! I don't want to deal with it!’

I felt angry, but I also sympathised. When my plants brown and dye off, when my roses ball up and don’t bloom, I also feel the rage of ‘whys’ and can’t really cope. I regret undertaking the role of responsibility for them in the first place and feel they'd be better off with someone else. I like to believe her anger came from the same place mine often does; an anger that comes from inability to deal with failure. But nature is full of failures and we cannot control them all.

So down the tree came in a harsh, brutal symphony that sounded like somebody was piledriving the rock hard pavement. The tree was fighting, I could feel it. It did not want to go. My neighbour was having trouble sawing through it with his chainsaw. I wonder what kind of people have chainsaws to hand, or whether he bought it specifically to appease his wife and remove this fir whose browning tips had stressed her out so much. I stifle my anger at the policing of nature and wonder if my almost 2 two story high bay tree that encroaches on the entrance to my house, requiring permission from it to pass, is why I receive so many shaken heads from neighbours walking past my house.

The nature around here is policed to a ridiculous extent. Rosebushes halfed, dead trees teeming with life removed, wildflowers mowed because the community complain about dandelions, marshmallow, forget-me-nots, primrose, Jupiter's beard and cleavers, patches of fruiting wild strawberry strimmed to the bone. The amount of times I’ve gone to forage for something I’ve driven past the day before to find it a pile of blended greenery, fruits and flowers bleeding into the bone dry grass is depressing, and depleting. People do not seem to be comfortable with the comings and goings of nature, and especially not with the goings, in all the meaning of the word. My neighbours tree was still very much alive, and I was woken by its screams on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning. The stump is already sprouting new greenery, with a fern for company; resilient ferns, there as if to say ‘it’s ok, we can survive this somehow’.

I write a lot about my relationship to plants but I am often reluctant to share it. It feels personal, full of admissions of failure, doubt, and pain at death and decimation, whether by mildew blown in by the drying wind or slugs hoovering up my budding marigolds. It is teeming with jealousy at the gardens I see flourishing, the rosebushes I see climbing up the sides of houses when I’ve had to reduce mine to the bone from blackspot or saw-flies. It is teeming with those stress-filled, rageful, childlike ‘why’s.

Instead, I want to share a piece of writing I wrote on the Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio. The Moon was at 14º Scorpio, Sun at 14º Taurus, and the nodes at 3º Scorpio/Taurus. Take it as a long-form poem about reckoning with death; literal death, spiritual death, personal death. You could take it to be about reckoning with lack of control, and a pondering of what your body can give once you’re gone.

As the Sun mades it’s journey through Gemini, and the lunations we had there, I felt a deeper death, one that signified a sense that the riddles and the wisdom of chatty Gemini may not be the gospel you thought they were, and the constant yearning for Sagittarius truth, may not be the noble search you think it is. Those lunations took me deep into myself to question the words I live by; why I am so obsessed with objectivity and truth, and how this discourse-ridden social media run world keeps us in this loop of searching, which is fit for Sagittarius’ intellectual wanderlust. I am a Gemini Rising with a Sag Jupiter, so perhaps those lunation’s were less tough on you.

Instead of searching, yearning, questioning, intellectualising, I delved. I came back to the body. I came back to this piece of writing, which I feel sets the tone for the nodal shift into Aries and Libra. Themes of anger and fertility; the age-old concept of the ‘swidden’, the British term for a clearing where fallow vegetation is hacked, left to dry and is then burned as a fertilising process for the land, also called ‘slash and burn’ (and I’m sure there are many, many more legitimate, indigenous terms for the practice which I can’t find with a quick search online).

Since we are still wrapping up our time with the nodes in Taurus/Scorpio, however, this piece focussing on marshy topics and death-as-process, as something that is often avoided in our societies desperation to avoid grief stopping us in our capitalistic tracks, as something that even a lot of astrologers avoid when discussing Scorpio. I didn’t know where there may be a place for this piece but it was @daniel_the_lion ’s beautiful piece about Scorpio that really inspired me to finally share it; his writing on Scorpio is a piece that I have come back to again and again and is refreshing in its marshy, mucky, fearless facing of Scorpio and all it’s facets.

Content warning for suicidality and dead bodies, as a lot of my writing though not directly about it, comes from my lifetime of trauma and working through my default to suicide; that I would be better as a ‘thing’, a memorial, compost, ash sprinkled through people’s memories. This came from a reckoning of self-death with the latest eclipses, and a reckoning with lack of control from watching my beloved plants die as the weather shifted from weeks of hail and rain to sudden dry heat and a wind that brought disease and pests. A reckoning with things that cannot be controlled, but must be accepted, and a conclusion that just because something may be dying a little bit inside, as I so often am, does not mean you need to, or have the right to, just kill it clean off, and that it will still have feelings, emotions, and spirit for a long while afterwards if you do:

‘It feels like everything around me is dying. It poured with rain and the plants drank it up, but now it’s baking sun with a desert dry wind and my plants don’t know what to do with it. When its sunny I go out for a cigarette but it doesn’t quench the bodily thirst that feels like needs quenching. It feels completely unquenchable. I don’t feel like cuddles would do it. I don’t feel like resting would do it.

I don’t feel like food, or ice cream, or tea, would do it, nor cigarettes, nor alcohol, nor water. I do not know what to do with this thirst.

A thirst so bodily open, permeable.

I do not want to be so permeable. If I could close a few doors perhaps that would help.

I could have a bath but I fear my insides would melt into it, leaving my skin floating in a blood bath of entrails, a floating plastic life size doll unable to fully dissolve,

my skin like that of an onion, or a potato, or a banana, or a sweet pepper.

A soup of my-self, self gone undone, self gone melted, disintegrated, infusing the waters with my own liquid, held in the sinews and strings of my lymph. Gone, gone, gone. My hair would float, and eyelashes stay stuck to the butterfly lids that once closed, now emptied and round.

My ears, would they be intact? Could I still hear? Would the cartilage of my knees dissolve and leave a puckered floating skeleton, hidden by my translucent skin, bones softly rattling the water in flesh coloured mesh.

Perhaps some undigested food would float to the surface.

Perhaps my lips would move in the shallow ripples made by pops and bubbles and I would eat it in a Sisyphean dance.

In and out, loop-de-loop.

Perhaps I can still speak.

Perhaps I would moan a ghostly gargled moan like a deep sea whale, lips lapping on the surface, speaking deep within the waters.

Desire does not dissolve, it may vomit out in a dough from my dangling lips, and you could fish it out for me, keep it in a box, or bake it or burn it and watch the smoke make shapes of a life that will, can, won’t ever be.

Perhaps I could lie there as my body separates and let my lips bob open and closed, let the spirit of the flesh say its piece, spewing solid words, alphabet pasta.

Perhaps it would be chatty, perhaps you could sit with it and play, a word search, perhaps you could use me as an oracle for this new contained contaminated world.

Perhaps I would let out one long moan with bubbling interruptions, nothing to say. Perhaps I would cough and splutter, the human-ness left over knowingly drowning and performing it, no substance left with which to actually drown, or rather drowning in self, and I don’t think that would make a noise. There is no sense to be made here, and why give sound to non-sense, in such times.

I am stewing in water but I am still thirsty. My dangling throat hangs suspended unquenched.

I am thirsty for a scream. I want to feel the muscles in my neck clench as the pain-noise screech rips from my lungs and I scream and scream and scream until I create another mound of flesh for company. I want to scream out something solid, something heavy, something my floating form cannot hold anymore, but cannot be ignored.

How would I know if I had screamed if there were no one there to hear me? I wish there could be someone to hold my limp, flaccid, empty, papery fingers.

My ears would sink and I would be at the bottom of the ocean-soup of my self, listening to the slow waves of sound as this bath of decay rattles and gloops. Gone from the world where things move faster, where ears can hear, and gone, gone, gone from eyes who would want to see me in that state.

Gone from a world which requires me to move around in it. The world can now move around me, undisturbed by my solidity.

I sink and I melt until I can sink no further, and I am reassembled in putrid water, waiting to emerge as something else, waiting for things to grow from me, in me, moss wrapping around my hair, joining it in the fickle floating of stagnancy.

My only prayer is that I am fit for compost, degrading, decaying, dying so deep, dying so hard that room is made for life to form from the concave black hole of my body; energetic, receding.

Making room for new, making sloshing room for feed, making room for ripples, making room for bloom.

Hear ye, all those who come near! Forget your nose, for my scent won’t be too pretty.

Instead imagine me on two feet, floating, in a white linen dress in a grove of wild lavender and rose. Imagine me animated by sticks under flesh, bare feet joined with the ground, wafting cypress and bergamot, willow leaves drooping with my long tangled hair. Imagine the earth holding me, animating me, it’s sacred offspring, a doll, a toy, giggling and laughing like contagious child.

Play with me. Play with me here.

Or dip your finger, stir me up, if you dare. Make shapes with my entrails, if they still have form. Pluck my lips like a lover, smile and kiss my eyelids goodnight.’