The Virgo New Moon

Early tomorrow morning, the moon wanes to darkness in Virgo. Here, summer blusters out in a rain storm and I am getting ready to return to the classroom.

Virgo asks us to get real. Are my toes aligned? Do my fingers add up? All the small details of life can feel difficult and disorderly unless we let them fall into place and align.

I haven’t written a cosmic blog post in almost a year! It’s the rain storm that stopped me from rushing home. I got a too-sweet milky tea and a lemon bar in the cafe down the street and I’m sitting in my Flower Essence studio waiting it out, after a day of in-service, meetings and various levels of fear, collaboration, anxiety, sharing and planning.

New Moon Intentions & Messages

Yes, I do have a Flower Essence studio now! Did I last November? I think I was just moving in. I now have a place to see people in person for a Flower Essence consultation, if they are in northern Vermont, and a place to go to write and sit and just be. I don’t come as often as I would like, but a good New Moon intention for me would be to come more often, and to write.

The lesson of this New Moon came to me as I was walking through the door of the building that my studio is in:

“Feel into the way things are, not the way you want them to be”.

Just as the pesky details of life can feel like too much to handle at times, sometimes these very same details can remind us of the contours of a reality that we may be struggling against or denying.

Listening to the Details

As my lack of blog updates suggests, becoming a high school teacher has been filled with many, many pesky details that I never quite feel able to control or manage. My lesson plans, the kids in my class, their needs, my needs. Then there was my wedding: the planning, the people, the flowers, the venues, the vendors, the invites. I never thought I’d do either thing, teach in high school or plan a wedding, but I guess this is where the details wanted me to be.

All last year I was struggling to catch up with myself. Then Summer came and I breathed out. Now, before I begin again, I need to consider what I learned from last year. I am going to ask my students the same thing. We could all journal on it for the New Moon. What did we learn from where we have been?

Fingernail Fungus

My nails clue me in. For about a year I have had what I thought were nail problems on my hands due to gardening. My nails were always dirty and a bit smelly and strange. I tried cleaning them. I got nifty manicures that my teenage students gave me compliments on. This may not have been a good thing, since the last time I went, just to remove a gel manicure I didn’t want anymore, the manicurist, a beautiful woman from Kazakhstan, told me that I have nail fungus, in all my nails! And apparently you can catch it from nail salons. She’d never seen it so bad. How embarrassing. I was shocked and dismayed, but also relieved to finally have a diagnosis. I must have been exposed to it somehow, I think probably in the shared gloves I wore when I worked on the farm a few years ago.

My manicurist was not optimistic. The treatment will be long she said. It might never go away. I’ve been soaking with Epsom salts and apple cider vinegar, applying tea tree and oregano essential oils, diluted in oil of course, and putting my finger tips in lemons, following the advice she gave me, and waiting to see what happens.

I also got curious.

I’ve always been rather vain about my hands, fingers and nails. They taper elegantly and my nails were always short but strong. I liked them. I remember feeling so dismayed when they started to look strange. But I ignored it. Maybe it was just age? I should have paid attention to the details.

Since my diagnosis, I have been looking for the meaning of this particular ailment. Apparently it is pretty common. I like to use Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life book for the metaphysical meaning of symptoms.

For her, what do the fingers symbolize? The details of life. The hands, grasping, holding things. Fungus represents stagnating beliefs and a refusal to release the past, letting the past rule today. The nails represent protection. Putting all of this together, my ugly nails teach me a lesson. With all the changes in my life, I have struggled to release what I no longer need (funnily enough, I will have a yard sale this weekend, the third one this summer, so I can still keep practicing that one). In the past, fear ruled my life, but it no longer needs to. I can work with some new beliefs, which I know from experience will help my fingernails heal when used in conjunction with the physical treatments I am working with.

I am safe. I can protect myself. I am protected.

I take care of the details of my life without worrying and comparing, wondering and stressing. The devil is only in the details if I allow him to sit there and grin at me.

I see that wanting things to be different than they are causes me more worry and stress. Instead, I can step into my current reality like a new dress. The Moon helps.

The Desire for Perfection

When I think of Virgo, I also think of the desire for perfection. Virgo is an Earth sign, and she wants things completed and whole. I have always struggled with wanting things to be perfect. I never feel I can attain perfection, in anything I do. I remember, as a child in school in Switzerland, a country of perfection if ever there was one, when a teacher asked me to draw the other side of a photographed face. My side came nowhere near reflecting the original. I also feel that I can never reproduce something I have done in exactly the same way. I am messy and my life never looks like perfection, even on the channels that are supposed to manufacture it. What if my desire for perfection was already satisfied? The Virgin is whole and perfect because she is the way she is. She doesn’t have to do anything.

Enjoy this precise Virgo energy, your harvests and the beginning of fall!

Are you interested in tuning into the natural cycles and the plant spirits to tend to your life’s details? You can book an exploratory call with me or schedule a flower essence consultation by booking on my website or reaching out to me.

I’ll write again soon!

Have a beautiful New Moon!

Amy