Van Gogh's Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette
I've been a little quiet lately. It's been a Maryland Smith Island-level layer cake of grief, loss, illness and so much else. The past few months have felt like one long midlife reckoning with things I thought I understood about myself, my relationships, my work and what I imagined my future might look like.
It’s been a lot, and frankly, I’m tired. Honestly, tired really doesn’t even cover it. It’s an all-encompassing, holistic exhaustion. And just when I think I have nothing left, another gut punch comes along to drop me back to my knees. I feel like I’ve spent so much of this year trying to get ahead and understand what to expect and prepare myself, but life had other plans. So much change, and while I knew this was a Fire Horse Year, one that heralded major changes, I don’t think I could’ve prepared for just how different my life would look from April until now. Some things ended abruptly, others unraveled slowly, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I realized just how much time, effort and energy I’d been spending trying to hold everything together, including a lot of things that were never mine to hold in the first place.
I've done the work, diving deep into my shadow to determine what's mine and what isn't, how much of my struggle has been about trying to control the circumstances rather than accepting the hand I've been dealt, but every time I think I can come up for air and catch my breath, it feels like another wave comes crashing down on me, and half the time, I feel like I'm being tossed around in some sort of emotional riptide I can't seem to get away from. And that brings me to the Scorpio of it all.
We're in Scorpio season now, which seems particularly appropriate given that we're approaching Halloween, Samhain and the time of year traditionally associated with death, remembrance, transformation and the thinning of the veil between worlds. There's a meme floating around that says something along the lines of, "I love the ocean, but whatever's going on beneath the surface has my respect but is none of my business." It's funny, and I get it. When you look below the surface, it can be calm and dreamy or absolute nightmare fuel. Depends on where you are and how deep you go.
Scorpio is most at home in the dark depths, with little interest in the surface, and we've got a lot of Scorpio energy heading into this spookiest of seasons. I've always thought of Scorpio as the most fiery of water signs, with a blazing ability to pierce through the murk and muck and see exactly what our emotions are trying to tell us, or, more often than we might want to admit, what we're hiding in the darkness. Scorpio wants to know what's down there, why it's there, and what influence it might be having on everything else. And while there's tremendous value in that kind of exploration, there's also the question of how long we need to stay psychologically or emotionally submerged before we come back up for air.
Tomorrow, Monday October 26th, the Full Hunter’s Moon rises in Taurus, directly opposite the Scorpio Sun, and the astrology surrounding this particular Full Moon has quite a bit to say about the past. Traditionally, the Hunter’s Moon marks the time after the autumn harvest when people prepared for the long winter ahead, gathering what they needed to sustain them through the colder, darker months. This moon is also sometimes referred to as the Falling Leaves Moon, the Sanguine Moon and the Blood Moon, names associated with the changing seasons, the autumn hunts and the coming preparations for winter, rather than the Moon’s actual color. There’s something poetic about that symbolism, especially with so much of the astrology pointing toward reflection, reevaluation and taking stock of what we want to carry into the future. With winter coming, it’s important to really reflect and streamline so we’re not bringing anything unnecessary with us, something our ancestors knew well.
Just a few days ago, Venus formed a cazimi with the Sun in Scorpio, marking the final Scorpio Venus Star Point in a sequence that's been repeating approximately every eight years since the 1930s. When this particular point returns in 2034, it will have moved into airy Libra, the sign of balance, harmony and reciprocity. I find the symbolism of that transition fascinating, but then again, I'm a big fan of pattern recognition. I can't help myself even when I wish I could. So let's examine it together, shall we? Venus governs love, relationships, pleasure and our values, while Scorpio brings questions of intimacy, trust, power, attachment and the things we share with others. And as if that weren't enough, Venus is retrograde and has just moved backward into Libra, while Mercury has also stationed retrograde in Scorpio. There's an awful lot of looking backward happening right now, especially between those two signs.
In astrology, retrogrades are traditionally associated with reflection, review and revisiting things from our past. When you add Venus and Mercury to the mix, that points toward reviewing our relationships, our values, how we communicate, the stories we tell ourselves and the ways our experiences have shaped our understanding of love, security and belonging. There's something particularly interesting about having these planets moving backward while the Full Moon brings things into focus, almost as though we're being asked to take inventory of where we've been before deciding where we're going. That seems to be a recurring theme of 2026, examining the different corners of our lives before moving into whatever comes next, making sure we don't carry forward the ghosts of a past we were unwilling to confront. It's a chance to give up the ghosts, so to speak.
This is a Full Moon in Taurus post, so let's address the bull in the room. Taurus is an earth sign, and it's concerned with stability, security, comfort, luxury and the tangible pleasures of life. It likes solid ground beneath its feet, familiar surroundings and the reassurance that comes from knowing where things stand. And like a good counterbalance, Scorpio understands that sometimes the very things we cling to for security are the things preventing us from making the changes we need. And I think that's where the tension of this Full Moon becomes particularly interesting. How much of what we're holding onto genuinely supports us, and how much are we maintaining out of habit, obligation, fear or simply because we've invested so much of ourselves that we can't imagine walking away?
With Venus retrograde, I’ve found myself examining those questions in the context of my relationships and the roles I’ve assumed throughout my life. One thing that has become painfully clear to me is that, more often than not, I’ve confused being needed or competent with being valued or cherished, keeping the peace with actually feeling peaceful, and being capable of carrying something with being obligated to carry it. I was the kid in school who did the work to get an A while the others goofed off, and it was a relief in my gifted classes when I could actually share the work. But my adult life has been more like the former than the latter, sadly. Those are some uncomfortable truths to face when you’ve spent decades operating under an entirely different set of assumptions. It’s not easy, but personally, I’d rather know the uncomfortable truth so I can recalibrate toward a life that’s better for me in the long run.
I believe deeply in self-reflection, shadow work and understanding the ways our experiences shape us. But I've also come to recognize how easily that process can become another form of rumination, where every uncomfortable feeling requires an investigation and every difficult experience becomes another assignment in personal development. We can become so preoccupied with understanding why things happened, what they mean and what we're supposed to learn from them that we forget there's an entire life happening outside our own heads. At some point, we have to stop examining our lives long enough to actually live them.
There's something fitting about all this looking backward during a season associated with ghosts, ancestors and remembrance. We all carry pieces of our past with us, including people we've loved, relationships we've lost, experiences that changed us and versions of ourselves that no longer exist. And I don't think the point of revisiting those things is necessarily to release everything or forget what happened. Some things deserve to be remembered. Some experiences contain lessons we haven't fully understood, and some of the people we've lost remain important parts of who we are. But there are also things that belong in the past, and I think we owe it to ourselves to recognize the difference.
We can revisit our experiences, acknowledge what happened, understand what we've learned and decide what deserves to accompany us into the future. We don't need to keep resurrecting the things we've already laid to rest, or abandon the love and wisdom we've gained simply because the circumstances surrounding them were painful. Otherwise, we risk spending our lives haunted by things that no longer exist, or becoming ghosts ourselves, wandering around the ruins of lives we've already outgrown.
And after the year I've had, I'm increasingly interested in what comes next. I don't know exactly what that looks like yet. I'm still grieving, still recovering, still figuring out what I want my life to be now that so much of what I imagined has changed. But I'm also tired of trying to anticipate every possible outcome, understand every motivation and manage circumstances that were never entirely within my control. I want to spend more time outside, create things, enjoy the people and animals I love, and remember that life is happening right now, regardless of whether I've figured everything out.
I'll probably always be curious about what's beneath the surface. It's part of my nature, and I don't imagine I'll ever stop diving into the deeper questions about life, love and what it means to be human. But I'm learning that understanding the past doesn't mean I have to keep living in it. There are people and experiences I'll always carry with me, and others I've held onto long after their place in my life has ended. Some deserve to be remembered with love, while others have become familiar simply because I've carried them for so long.
And I think that's what this Full Moon is asking us to consider. Which parts of our past are worth preserving, which lessons are worth remembering, and which ghosts we've allowed to follow us for far too long. We can't change what's happened, and we can't always control what comes next, but we can recognize the difference between the memories that enrich our lives and the ones we keep allowing to consume them.
For me, this has been a year of profound grief, but within that grief, I can feel the seeds of who I'm becoming beginning to take root, even if I don't yet know what that will look like. And that’s not always easy, the not knowing. Loss is a profound alchemist, and whether it's someone we love, a relationship that ends, or a version of ourselves we've outgrown, it changes us, sometimes in ways we don't recognize until much later. And I think that's where the tension between Taurus and Scorpio becomes particularly meaningful. We want to hold onto what we know, what we've loved and what once made us feel secure, even as life asks us to accept that some things have changed, some irrevocably. But letting go doesn't mean forgetting, and moving forward doesn't mean leaving everything behind. Some ghosts are the people we've loved and lost, whose presence we welcome in our memories. Other ghosts may manifest as the disappointments, regrets, fears and old versions of ourselves that we've given far too much time and space in our minds, hearts and lives. And while we may not be able to choose which ghosts visit us, we have more say than we realize in which ones we invite to stay.
