Happy Virgo New Moon! New moons are new beginnings and this one will highlight diet, nutrition, health, service, organization, craft, perfection, purity, and mastering the details. Virgo is a highly under rated sign. Not sure why. While you were hitting the snooze button, Virgo was already up, showered, and checking off items from its color coded to-do list like a boss. Yeah, so there. The new moon will clock in at 10:12 am EDT, August 25, 2014 at 2 degrees Virgo.

The lineup of planets for this new moon is very interesting. Not only does the new moon fall on a powerhouse merge of Mars and Saturn at 17 Scorpio, but the same day as Venus/Uranus trine (120 degrees; harmonious), and Mercury sextile Mars and Saturn (60 degrees; helpful). Venus is also square Mars and Saturn as well (90 degrees; stressful). In plain English? A lot will unfold in the coming week, events and opportunities seeded by many potent forces in play.

The thing that really gets me about the new moon is that it opposes Neptune at 6 Pisces. It’s not even the tightest aspect in the chart (that honor goes to Mercury in line to Mars and Saturn), but it’s the one that tells the biggest story. Neptune oppositions are all about surrender and a process designed to remind us that there is force outside of the daily minutiae of life. To quote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who put it more eloquently, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

For all of Virgo’s mastery of the earthly details of life, it is Pisces that invites us to find balance in service to something beyond this world through compassion and unconditional love. In short, Virgo is earthly service and Pisces is spiritual service. I think the new moon, as it unfolds over the next few days, will be a conversation about surrender. As much as Virgo wants everything to be perfect — it certainly has the organization skills to pull it off — we will see just how far our earthly control will take us. If everything is not going according to plan, is it possible that Spirit has something else in mind?

I spend a lot of time thinking of Neptune. Hard not to when it plays such a major role in my natal chart. And if I’ve learned anything it’s that Neptune aspects speak to a need to bring union and harmony between matter and spirit. You can’t do ego when Neptune is involved. And so I think another facet of the new moon is a meditation on how we can bring more spirit into our earthly lives. How can we make spirit a part of something as mundane as drinking coffee or commuting to work? Through consciousness and intention.

So how does this all plug into the Mars/Saturn conjunction? We certainly can’t ignore these heavy duty planets, especially because they are in the same degree as Mercury, the ruler of the new moon. The conjunction is a big deal alignment that happens every two years. It is about action and will coming into alignment with commitment and long term vision. See? Not as scary as its reputation would have you believe. Saturn is also a planet that doesn’t dither about. It’s very black and white. It says you can go left or you can go right, but you can’t go both directions. You have to make a commitment to one. This new moon will not only be about finding balance between the earthly and mystical, but cutting away anything that gets in the way of having a deeper connection with spirit and your authentic self. This could be food, substance, relationships, or even your own deeper psychological material. Virgo will bring you a powerful new beginning in the coming days.

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