Ever since you were a child you’ve known the moon and perhaps she’s known you too. Every night, she was there, sometimes as slight as a fingernail clipping and sometimes as heavy as a coin on a corpse’s eye. You might have wished upon her in every iteration, drawn to her fullness and desperate in her crescent dark. And even if your wish never materialised, to wish at another body — albeit heavenly — was an intimate act and intimacy has its own rewards.
Perhaps, with the years, the intimacy increased. How could it not? It was the same moon no matter where you were, sometimes veiled by clouds but never completely gone. An intimacy like that is a gift but it’s tempting to take that kind of gift for granted. The Sagittarian full moon knows it’s tempting to believe that if you’ve encountered a living being enough times, you know that being’s story. Impelled by knowledge and its many splinters, the full moon in Sagittarius knows intimacy taken for granted is an intimate trap.
Not an Indiana Jones booby-trap mountain kind of trap, mind you. Not a metal jaw placed intently under a pile of leaves. No, the trappings of perceived intimacy, of familiarity, are trapping most Earthlings find themselves sorting through one way or another. We’re prone to it, afterall, we’re driven to simplify what we experience, to categorise what we see into compartments we can consume more readily. Think about the first time we see a colour, how we strive to place it in the wheel of colours that we know. How one person’s misfortune begets stories of other misfortunes, one loss compared to innumerable others. This is what happens when a child encounters a planetary body and it’s what happens when we meet someone new.
Not an Indiana Jones booby-trap mountain kind of trap, mind you. Not a metal jaw placed intently under a pile of leaves. No, the trappings of perceived intimacy, of familiarity, are trapping most Earthlings find themselves sorting through one way or another. We’re prone to it, afterall, we’re driven to simplify what we experience, to categorise what we see into compartments we can consume more readily. Think about the first time we see a colour, how we strive to place it in the wheel of colours that we know. How one person’s misfortune begets stories of other misfortunes, one loss compared to innumerable others. This is what happens when a child encounters a planetary body and it’s what happens when we meet someone new.
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“Yes,” we say when someone asks if we know what they mean, though we can’t be quite sure we do. It can feel easier, more amiable, to nod along with the story, to create intimacy through agreement. In many ways it works, in many ways, a body turns away, feels listened to and seen. But, in other ways, intimacy between two beings is deferred. One person feels listened to but is not understood, one person seems to be touching closeness but never finds it. In the cosmos, the full moon makes a square to Neptune, peeling the layers off a conversation that seems shrouded in what is unsaid — challenging us to admit what we don’t know, to ask more questions and assume less.
The Sun in Gemini opposes the moon in Sagittarius while Neptune and Saturn do their thing, forming a triangle that encourages us to learn from our mistakes, especially our assumptions about each other. While this may sound like a wide-ranging mandate, it can be as simple as admitting that you don’t know what someone means, that you’d like your beloved to repeat what they’ve said in a different way, in case it might make more sense to you.
The full moon’s sextile to Saturn supports this kind of mundane relationship-building, it carves a groove for connection built on mutual trust — trust that your loved one wants to understand you, trust that your friend doesn’t need you to know-all and be-all in order to be enough.