The Ever-Changing Face of God
Pisces New Moon: February 20, 2023
peaking at 2:05 A.M. EST
happening at 1°22’ Pisces
click links above for timezone converter & to check the placement in your chart
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I realized I’d made a mistake, but was it a mistake?
A celestial map lay before me, marking the positions of the planets on June 23, 2023. My eyes focused on two overlapping glyphs, indicating the conjunction of the asteroids Leukothea and Chiron. How could it be?
I had just looked at the same map the other day, and I could have sworn that it wasn’t Chiron next to Leukothea but instead, the north node of the moon - the destiny point.
My eyes blinked, but on either side of their closure, the result was the same: On June 23, 2023, Leukothea and Chiron will be at the exact same place in the sky while the destiny point will be many degrees away.
If the map had been made of paper, it would have flown from my desk in that moment, revealing a stack of maps beneath it and all the future dates yet to be explored.
As I thumbed through them, I saw when it was happening - the asteroid Leukothea conjunct the destiny point, for real this time - and I realized: The cycle…the Cleansing of Sacred Light…it doesn’t end in June…that’s just another inflection point…leading us to February 4, 20…24.
I looked up from the maps, struck by the realization that the cycle I’d recently written about was much longer than I’d thought. It’s lasting nearly two and a half years of our lives - from October 2021 to February 2024.
And then, I started to feel uneasy in my solar plexus. My inner straight-A, perfectionist urged me to open the last chapter of this story and fix the mistake I’d made. She spoke in a contracted cadence like “out out damn spot,” but something more loving and gentle stopped me from listening, showed me a memory in my mind: the image of the map with Leukothea and the destiny point conjunct in June.
That’s what I saw, and I sensed that I saw it on purpose, that for whatever reason, that was the story we had needed to hear, and I recalled the beginning of the last chapter and how I wrote: Let us leave technicalities aside and instead endeavor to understand…the stone at the center of all things.
Perhaps this “mistake” was one of those technicalities? But I feared that I was wrong yet again, and that now, I was simply performing some mental gymnastics to justify my own shortcomings. The facts were right in front of me as plain as day: what I wrote was wrong, and I should fix it.
In the days that followed, that same perfectionistic voice kept reminding me: You need to fix the part about Leukothea in The Magic Guide.
But every time, another voice responded with an authoritative silence that stopped me in my tracks, wouldn’t even let me hit edit on the text, let alone change the words.
I saw in my mind how the story was unfolding for us. How first, we were told that this great cycle was taking us through June, and now, it’s revealed - like the unlocking of the next seal - that the path of this particular evolution is much longer. But maybe, if we’d known how long it was going to take - even just a couple of weeks ago - our patience would have been harder to find.
And through all of this, I found myself thinking about my commitment to always, to the best of my ability, tell the truth.
I have a terrible poker face.
I don’t ever want to lie.
I hold steadfast to what I know to be true even when it’s inconvenient.
Still, during the Leo full moon time, multiple instances arose that led me to question the nature of truth and to wonder if maybe truth telling is more nuanced than I once believed.
As I began to entertain this notion, I immediately saw all of the ways it could be misconstrued and abused in mal-intentioned hands. For this reason, I thought it may be best to dig my heels into a foundation of clear and certain F-A-C-T-S, but when I tried, I found nary a foundation beneath my feet, and instead, my mind was drawn like Alice, down the rabbit hole.
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The goddess Daphne ran through the forest green. An arrow came swirling down from the sky and struck her in the chest. She removed it cleanly, noting with surprise that she bore no visible wound. She only found in the days to come that she suddenly loathed all things romantic. She no longer had any interest in love or lust, and when she saw the god Apollo run towards her, she ran in the opposite direction.
Rather than bear his continued advances, she decided to stop being a woman and to instead become a tree.
The tree was named Laurus nobilis and is commonly known as a bay laurel or sometimes, a true laurel.
Today, you’ll find its branches wrapped around the heads of Italian graduates - an ode to the Roman emperors who once did the same because, it was believed, so did Apollo. And this is how, in time, the laurel wreath became known as a crown of victory, depicted on master’s degrees and hidden in the honorific “laureate.”
Historically, to be crowned with laurel is a tremendous honor - all because of a fictional story that sparked a pattern of behavior that’s meaning, even thousands of years later, is still conveyed.
We live in a world of layers.
Layers of meaning, layers of perspectives, and yes, layers of truth.
The scientific method - perhaps our best invention yet - attempts to do away with the layers, to see beyond them and cut straight to the heart of what remains steady and reliably, consistently true. This is the beauty of science. Through repeated observation, we can discern that something that is true for me is also true for you. We can uncover the foundational, material reality that unites us all, except…when we try, we soon find that this foundational material reality is itself layered and hard to hold within the certainty of rules and laws.
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On the surface of things, laws like gravity appear consistently true for all of us, and by applying these laws, we’ve been able to invent countless functional technologies. Yet, the moment we take a closer look and zoom in on the world of particles, seemingly hard and fast rules (like gravity) cease to apply and seemingly impossible things - like information moving faster than the speed of light - suddenly appear to be true.
We are bound by our bodies, our minds.
At least, this is the regular, daily reality most of us face.
We do not fly into the sky. We do not wave our hands and watch objects appear. We do not pass go, we do not collect $200, and we are - for all intents and purposes - perpetually living in a beautiful, earthly jail. Imprisoned by the mysterious laws of Life on Earth.
We are living like roses in the dark - our petals held so tightly together that even careful observation leads us to conclude that the bud is all there is.
We often remain convinced of this fact until the rising sun, shining brightly in the afternoon, forces the bud to blossom, opening its petals to reveal the many layers that were hiding inside.
And science, with all its tools, remains focused on just the bud, observing it at every possible angle and scale, but still, unable to see what it becomes in the light.
This is not science’s fault. It’s not even a failing. It is an expertise, a powerful specialization that helps us understand how things work within a particular layer of reality.
And here, in this layer, there are facts - earthly facts that help us decipher right and wrong, true and false.
But from the perspective of the flower, the bud is just a starting point, a protective shell, and our earthly facts are much the same. They grant us a security of certainty that we can know and trust, but when we break the binds of this rigid perspective and the flower blooms, the same rules around truth no longer exist. At least, not exclusively.
We leave behind the world of earthly facts - which continue to be true within the realm of Earth - and we find ourselves entering another world, another layer….the land of transcendent truth.
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Transcendent truth is not about right and wrong. Instead, it’s like a dance.
I see it in my mind: a person dancing on stones.
One foot is on one stone, and the other foot is on another stone, and after a few beats here, the person hops to new stones, and the dance goes on and on like this, hopping between stones, always moving.
Each stone represents SOMETHING THAT IS TRUE, but it’s almost as if the stones are hot, and if you stay on any one of them for too long, you get burned.
Because in the land of transcendent truth, what is true is not fixed. This is not to say that there is no truth, but rather, that truth itself is ever-evolving, always shifting and changing.
This transcendent truth pours down to earth, affecting what is true for us as individuals and what’s true for the world at large and even what’s understood to be true through science.
Truth is not a fixed, objective thing but a moving target. It’s kind of like a particle. You can’t observe everything about it all at once, and the moment you observe part of it, something else about it changes.
And as I received this information about transcendent truth - downloaded into my mind the morning of February 12, 2023 - I wondered: is it true what they say? Is change the only constant and therefore, the only truth?
As I asked this question, I saw - in my mind’s eye - a flash of the world through time, and I saw how the whole world - and even the face of God - is constantly changing shape.
And the truth is - that is what we are.
We are shapeshifters.
So say the words on the stone where I find myself dancing now.
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The texture’s just not the same. My husband lay down his spoon in frustration and put the dairy-free ice cream back in the freezer.
Decades ago, his body stopped producing lactase, and so he found himself as a young adult, no longer able to enjoy the things he once loved - ice cream, pizza, tiramisu.
Why don’t you try the pills again? I suggested, referencing the over-the-counter capsules designed to give his body the enzyme it no longer made on its own.
He’d tried them once before - early on - and became violently ill. That twenty-year-old memory had kept him from the pills all this time, but now, the longing for real ice cream was stronger. He was ready to try again.
The blue pill box sat on the kitchen counter. The picture of a smiling cow assured him that with this, he could enjoy dairy again.
He hesitated, remembering just how sick he’d been that one time. But are you even the same person anymore? I asked.
Save for the continuity of consciousness reminding him of the past, every cell in his body had since been replaced. His personality had changed too. His beliefs had evolved.
True, he said. I’m not the same person. Are any of us? He wondered, recounting the thought experiment: If over time, every board in a ship is replaced. Is it the same ship?
We reflected on all the ways we’ve changed over the years, and how in so many ways, neither of us is remotely the person we once were, and he opened the box and removed a pill and swallowed.
That night, he ate real ice cream for the first time in years, and he didn’t get sick - not from the pill nor the dairy.
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We are often told something or we experience something, and we trick ourselves into believing that it’s true. Not just in that moment but always.
We forget that evolution is constant. Life evolves. Solar systems evolve. Galaxies evolve. Things that never were come to be and things that were cease to exist. Every moment of every day.
Of course, I’ve always loved animals and the taste of cinnamon. I’ve always written. I’ve always enjoyed discussing subjects like this. So while things are always changing, some things, it seems, stay the same. They persist through each transformation like essential building blocks of being. They anchor us to port - perhaps as a new ship, but still, mostly shaped the same and designed to react similarly to the varying gusts and waves of the world in which we live.
But let us not mistake similarity for sameness, for I am not the same, and neither, I imagine, are you.
I wrestled with this very idea when writing my wedding vows, for how could I commit to the person in front of me when I knew that I would not stay the same and neither would he?
The recognition of this change had to be part of my commitment, so I wrote:
“What I can promise is to be open to that change. To let you be yourself, whoever you become. To stay curious about who you are. To avoid assumptions based off old memories and former versions of ourselves. To love where we are for what it has to offer us each step of the way. And to always, to the best of ability, help you know that you are free and you are loved.”
On February 12th, as all of this information - these ideas - about truth and change moved through me, I suddenly realized that for most of my life, I had approached the existence of God as something that was either true or false. I’d been looking at God from the perspective of earthly facts, but God is not a thing to behold. It is not some objective fact or fixed idea. To believe in God is not about agreeing with any specific ideas about what God is or isn’t, and I think, the moment we start trying to pin God down within this earthly layer, we stop being able to understand the truth of what God is, which is itself, transcendent.
Tich Naht Hahn once wrote about the idea that God is dead. He said, “this means that the notion of God must be dead in order for God to reveal himself as a reality.”
Throughout the hundreds of thousands of years in which people have existed, there have been countless notions about God and what God is and how many gods there are and what rules God wants us to follow, and it’s pretty easy to look at all the spiritual and religious traditions over the years and see that they are not the same. They are different, but still, we can see the ways in which they are similar. We can see ideas that have persisted through all the transformations of spirituality. Ideas like love and compassion and interconnection and something that is larger than us all, and I think it’s easy to look at the differences and assume that they are all just people’s various interpretations of the same thing. But what if they’re not?
What if, like everything else in this world, God changes and evolves with time?
Maybe every religion and spiritual tradition speaks to a way God was at some point. Maybe this is one reason why it’s so important to not look for God in books and rules and ideas written long ago but to instead keep looking for God in ourselves and in our lives every day.
And I think back to my wedding vows: “To let you be yourself, whoever you become. To stay curious about who you are. To avoid assumptions based off old memories and former versions.”
Is this not how we practice loving ourselves and each other and all things? You don’t love a person and remain fixed on their image at that point in time. You wake up every day and wonder: who are you today? And then, you love them.
God is not a fixed idea in which to believe. It’s not the stones you hop between. Maybe…it’s the dance itself. And believing in God, I think, is really just the practice of loving everything everywhere all the time. It’s the practice of unconditional love towards the ever-changing world in which we live. God is -
What is it? To you? Right now, in this moment?
Close your eyes and answer for yourself.
Then, let the answer keep evolving.
Let God tell you all about who God is for you and to you.
Let the answer shift and change.
Let it not be about right and wrong.
Let it instead all be true.
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On February 20th, the moon and the sun and the asteroid Daphne - named after the goddess who turned herself into a tree - are all aligning at the exact same spot in the sky.
This new moon time - from February 20th to March 6th - is all about breaking down the walls in our minds in order to make way for our own transcendent transformation.
When you let go of what you think you know - all the barriers of separation and certainty - what’s true?
Who do you become?
This new moon time marks the beginning of yet another great personal transformation. One that is leading us to the Pisces full moon on August 30th. That full moon will fall very close to where this new moon is falling now, but while the moon may find itself in a similar position, what we experience will not be the same. You are evolving, and for that, I am grateful. For your personal evolution does not happen in isolation. It is connected to a much larger evolution that spans the entire collective body of humanity and reaches out to all things, all the way from the core of the earth to the transcendent layers of God and back again.
In addition to Daphne, this moon is conjunct the planet Saturn and the asteroid Botophilia, named after Botolph of Thorney, aka the Patron Saint of Boundaries (also trade and travel - and, fun fact, Boston was actually named after him. Apparently the name of the city evolved over time, having started with the name “Botolph’s Stone.”).
This period of transformation is a direct result of our shifting boundaries as we blossom beyond what we think we know (and where we have been) and we begin to learn more about the many, many layers of reality and of opportunity.
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As we continue to transcend beyond fixed notions of right and wrong, we learn that wisdom is not the result of amassing truths and reaching conclusions, but instead, it’s born from perpetual investigation, from learning and getting it right and then learning some more and realizing you were wrong, and eventually, settling in the field that Rumi once described, and “when the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, [and] even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”
For no church is the temple, no book is the word, and no version of you is the best, most aligned, most perfect version. At the end of the day, all there ever is - again and again and again - is the ever-changing face of the world, unfolding before you, asking you to love it.
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To be continued…
Long Story Short:
This Pisces new moon time takes us from February 20th through March 6th, preparing us for a major LAUNCH with the Virgo full moon time (starting March 7th). The launch then connects to a larger personal transformation to be celebrated with the Pisces full moon in August. Everything that happens now is the result of your own mind’s ability to see beyond old ideas. Set yourself free and explore all the possibility in this world. Without expectation and desire. Simply let the world reveal itself to you. Let God reveal itself to you. Let yourself be awed and humbled by the revelations that unfold when you stop trying to make it right or get it right and instead let life be wondrous and beautiful in all its transmutations. For the next two weeks, practice loving every moment and everything, which is not to say that you don’t get sad or angry or hurt or feel hard things. Rather, it’s to say that you let yourself fully have your earthly experience while simultaneously connecting with your own transcendent ability to love it all. I think now about how I’m often overcome with love, and in those moments, I look at the world around me, and I can’t help but exclaim: Look at the mountains being mountains! Look at the birds being birds! Look at people being people! Can you let yourself just love everything for what it is? If this gets hard, I invite you to use my exclamation as a little mantra, like “Look at these tears being tears!” Look at everything just being what it is.
The Tip Jar
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