The new moon on September 10th is the one I look forward to every year.
It’s the clean slate moon.
The begin again moon.
The moon that arrives, takes one look at everything we’ve accumulated, and says, “Okay. What are we working with?”
I love this moon because it doesn’t ask us to become someone new. It asks us to get honest about the life we’re already living.
And I think there’s a difference.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about clarity.
Not the kind where you finally know what’s going to happen. (And PS, I would very much like to order some of that clarity, but apparently it is not currently on the menu.)
The other kind.
The kind where you know what is true for you even when you don’t know what happens next.
That kind of clarity doesn’t predict. It doesn’t guarantee. It doesn’t make anyone else behave the way you’d like them to. But it does something I hadn’t really understood until recently.
It gives you your freedom back.
I experienced this recently when I sat down to look honestly at a situation in my own life. I thought I was trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
Instead, I found myself asking a completely different question:
What do I want?
Not what can I have.
Not what is someone else willing to give me.
Not what is most likely to happen.
Not what should I want because it would be easier or more reasonable or make more sense.
But…What do I want?
It was surprisingly hard at first. And then it wasn’t. Once I stopped trying to solve the outcome, I could see my own life much more clearly.
I could see what I loved.
I could see what I missed.
I could see what had stopped working for me.
I could see the things I had accommodated for so long that I had forgotten I was accommodating them.
I could see what I wanted more of.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, I could see how much of what I wanted was already there.
That stopped me.
I think sometimes I imagine a clean slate as starting completely over from scratch. Throw everything away. Do everything differently.
But that feels extreme, doesn’t it?
New moon. New life. New you…Like on a pillow you see at TJMaxx.
But maybe that’s not what beginning again means at all. Sometimes there are a great many things that need to be kept as part of the new beginning.
If you’re in the middle of starting a new chapter, this moon is saying, “beginning again is looking at life with clear eyes and deciding what deserves to come with you.”
Keep what is alive.
The people, places, rituals, work, kitchen conversations over coffee in the mornings before work, dad jokes, ideas, pleasures, and tiny ordinary things that make you think: yes, this. More of this.
Restore what you’ve lost.
Not everything that disappears is meant to stay gone.
Sometimes things get crowded out.
Joy does.
Play does.
Creativity does.
Desire does.
Friendship does.
Parts of ourselves do.
Sometimes we don’t need something new. We need to notice what we loved before life got complicated and invite it back. Change what no longer works.
This one is harder because you can love something and still need it to change.
You can be grateful for what something has been and know you cannot continue experiencing it in the same way.
You can love a person and hold a boundary.
You can love your work and need a different relationship with it.
You can appreciate who you’ve been and stop asking that version of yourself to run your life.
Love doesn’t require endless accommodation. Sometimes love asks for honesty.
And then: Add something.
Something you’ve never had enough room for.
Adventure.
Rest.
Sex.
Art.
Friendship.
Books.
Tuesday afternoon movies.
A completely unreasonable hobby that your friends and family tease you about.
More dinners around a table.
A trip you’ve been talking about for six years.
Whatever makes you feel a little more alive when you imagine it. Put some of that in.
Because I don’t think our lives are only meant to be managed.
They’re meant to be inhabited.
And perhaps that’s the real invitation of this particular new moon. Don’t ask yourself to predict your life. Ask yourself to participate in it.
Because this moon is in Virgo — and lord of the rings help us — Virgo is the sign that looks around at your life and says, okay, but what is your plan? Not unkindly. Just clearly. Virgo is the editor, the organizer, the one who sees what needs to go and what needs to stay. It’s earthy and practical, and it will not let you be vague with yourself.
It has focus when you may be lacking focus. (This is, admittedly, a problem for me, too.)
So rude.
Then you add in the added planet movements of Venus moving into Scorpio and Mercury into Libra on the same day, and you’ve got a moon that’s asking you to get honest about your life, your relationships, and what you want to feel.
You don’t need to know exactly what’s coming next to know what matters to you.
You don’t need someone else’s certainty before you can have your own clarity.
You don’t need to know how everything turns out before deciding how you want your life to feel.
So on September 10th, find ten minutes.
Make four little headings on a piece of paper:
KEEP
RESTORE
CHANGE
ADD
And under those headings make your lists.
They don’t need to be impressive; they just need to be true.
What stays? What do you miss? What needs to be different? What haven’t you made room for yet?
Then put the pen and paper down.
You don’t have to fix your entire life before the moon comes back around.
You just have to recognize it.
Because beginning again doesn’t require abandoning everything that came before.
Sometimes beginning again is simply seeing your life clearly enough to choose it on purpose.
And then choosing it again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.