Prudent Heart, Wild Heart

Virgo's Prudent Heart is well known. She can walk into chaos, facing tasks of overwhelming difficulty, and make them quietly doable, organizing them into simple steps. She knows that anything is easy to do if you break it down, piece-by-piece. That's why one of my clients always pays her bills on a Virgo Moon. What seems daunting on any other day, becomes in Virgo a kind of meditation. The numbers become orderly, compliant, like a line of ants, each one carrying its bit to the proper destination.

This year, the day the Sun entered Virgo, I finally succeeding in backing up my computer. I know… you're thinking, "You haven't backed up your computer yet?!!" For years, this has been my guilty unmet obligation. Maybe there's one like it on your "To Do" list too. Mine required purchasing a writeable CD drive for my aging computer.

I tried doing it a couple times before. The specs on ports and system requirements had always swirled before my eyes; none of the boxes at the computer store seemed to match. The sales clerks always shrugged, "Umm, gee, I don't know." But now in Virgo's season, with crisp efficiency, a bright-eyed clerk led me straight to the only hardware that would work. At home, it plugged in easily, and within thirty minutes, the thing that had nagged at me for years was done. Just in time for Mercury's retrograde.

I danced. I soared. I sat on my porch and enjoyed the vastness of what hours before had been a crowded world. I felt a new freedom. And gradually I realized that this was Virgo too. It's the less publicized Virgo, the ancient mystery Virgo, the Virgin Virgo, harrassed by no one, pure and unafraid. Known as Diana to the Romans, Brigid to the Celts, Artemis to the Greeks, she's both hard-working and free. She roams with elemental forces, knows the secrets of roots and herbs, keeps the rhythms of earth and Moon, heals animals, assists in childbirth, climbs mountains, keeps hearths warm, and is entangled by nothing. This is Virgo with the Wild Heart.

Even as she works with diligence, she is amazingly free. If you hold a pencil just so this month, through sensitive fingers, the wild-hearted Virgin will let you hear the forest whispering inside. She'll walk you barefoot through the house, and point out the earth breathing beneath the floor. In An Unspoken Hunger, Terry Tempest Williams gives voice to this side of Virgo: "I felt innocent and wild, privy to secrets and gifts exchanged only in nature… Hands on the earth, I closed my eyes and remembered where the source of my power lies. My connection to the natural world is my connection to self-erotic, mysterious, and whole." Be sure to enjoy both of Virgo's hearts this season-the prudent one and the wild.

Your Personal Season

Last month in Leo you were creative, self-expressive… this month you'll be inspired to scrutinize your world. At the year's half-way point, in Virgo, you discern what is useful and valuable from what is not--like the Virgin, separating the wheat from the chaff. Virgo's spirit is a collective one, but where you're most moved to apply it will be personal, based on Virgo's placement in your chart. Here's where the Virgin's spirit is released. In Virgo's house, you're reaching towards perfection-you're called to refine something, reorganize something, dedicate yourself to meaningful work. This is not a bondage, but a joy! The sign on your sixth house cusp may suggest the style you prefer to use while roaming freely with the goddess. (For more information about both the personal and collective cycles, check out my monthly workshop Twelve Moons.)

Offering to the Personal Collective

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.