Let's Get Organized

As a schoolgirl, every year about this time, I’d take out a clean sheet of paper and with a bold, optimistic hand, write at the top:  “The New Me.”  Below it I would list all the wonderful qualities I was determined to adopt in the coming school year.  (“Smile,” “be helpful,” “always say something nice.”)  In the weeks before entering fifth grade, I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and following a suggestion in the book, made note cards of its winning slogans and strategies. 

I never noticed that I did this every year.  My self-improvement list always felt like something novel, invented by a spontaneous urge deep inside.  I know now that I was cycling with the zodiac long before I heard of it… that I did something creative and self-expressive during every Leo month, and in Virgo, I was always moved to absorb, digest and analyze my performance so far.  In Virgo, we discern what is useful and valuable from what is not--like the Virgin, separating the wheat from the chaff.  We’re humble.  We’re willing to work.  We’re willing to adapt ourselves to what’s necessary.  A seasonal hormone is released that inspires us to get newly organized. 

So what happened with my children?  Since the Sun entered Virgo, our four children have been eating nothing but empty-calorie sugar-processed foods.  They leave glasses and dishes in every room--though when asked who left the half-drunk glass of Kool-Aid on top of the television, it’s always “Nobody.”  They watch too much TV, play too many computer games.  They do their daily chores with the same effectiveness as a mime sweeping with an invisible broom.  

Then last night I overheard it.  The nine-year-old said to the ten-year-old, “This year I’m going to do all my homework as soon as I come home from school.  I’m going to study real hard.”  The ten-year-old replied, “And I’m going to get good grades.”  So they did have Virgo’s hunger for personal transformation!  I got to remember that though Virgo’s season is universal, how anyone expresses the Virgin’s urge toward perfection will always be exquisitely personal.  

Your Personal Season

Where Virgo appears in your birth chart suggests where you may currently be most motivated to break things down and organize them anew.  Virgo’s house adds to your cyclic agenda for the season.  (If you’d like to explore this is greater depth, you may enjoy my seasonal/new moon workshop, Twelve Moons.  Email me if you’d like more information!)   

Offering to the Personal Collective

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Psychologists suggest that each of us has a “sympathy group” of around 12 people, those individuals whose death would leave us truly devastated.  Psychologists also suggest we each have a larger group (around 150 people); these are ones we have social ties with, people we wouldn’t feel shy about joining if we bumped into them at Starbucks.  These groups represent your family and your tribe.  Think of them when you make your Virgo group offering.

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Be a positive vision holder for your circle.  In a meditative state, experience your own purity—imagine yourself the Virgin, unpossessed by anyone or anything mundane.  You’re rather inspired by an ideal of perfection in that part of your life that most needs improvement now.  Imagine too that your work (the shaft of wheat) is in your capable hands.  Realize that as you begin to do this work, you are expressing yourself in Virgo’s perfection of service.  Send the radiance of this energy into the web of people you know, starting with your family and extending it to your tribe.  Feel the perfection in the whole circle, how this energy exponentially increases as each member performs his or her work.  Allow the images of individuals from your family or tribe to come to your awareness and one-by-one see them as the discerning, productive and divine beings they truly are.  Throughout the solar month, as you connect with your family/tribe in daily life, listen for the part of their life currently under review.  Support their process of discernment.  If you find this energy difficult, it may be that Virgo is afflicted in your chart—all that means is you may have to work a little harder to enjoy its gifts.