“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

As I do each month at the New Moon I revisit my journal from previous years. This time 5 years ago we were a year into living the dream of our sea-change – a dream that wouldn’t have been reality if it hadn’t been borne of the chaos of circumstances.

For the past few years, it’s felt very much as though chaos had been pushing us forward. We made the decisions we did because a series of major challenges had pushed us out of inertia. Through the hardship of that reality, a dream was born.

If you follow my Instagram, you’d have gathered that I love my new life. It’s not perfect – nor would you ever expect it to be – but aside from missing friends, family and decent dumplings, even now 6 years on I pinch myself daily. At times it really does feel as though we’re living in a dream.

Per aspera ad astra – through difficulties (hardship) you will get to the stars. 

That’s no longer how it is. We still only have the one income, but our life is much simpler – and the quality of it is exponentially higher.

My creativity now is coming from a completely different place. It’s coming less from the chaos of experience, and more from my imagination and a place of pure fantasy. I’m seeing the possibility of story everywhere. My subject matter is different too – I’ve gone from writing romcoms or contemporary romance to women’s fiction and cosy crime.

At times though, it still feels as though I’m on holiday – or should be – even though I’m spending the same number of hours as I did back in Sydney in my day job. I’m finding though, that I have to work harder to create the boundaries in order to find meaning, definition and direction for my creative work – my dreams.

That’s one of the great contradictions with Pisces – we find it difficult to operate within boundaries so seek to escape them in order to recognise the possibility of our dreams, yet without those same boundaries, everything within us is a swirling mass of disorder. We need to keep one foot in reality, and the other in the waters of our dreams.

My late friend Clementine Atkins described it well in a post a number of years ago:

Within its boundless state, we have chaos, panic, fear.  Nothing is clear or precise – all is just a merging of images, dreams, ideals, memories, experiences, yearnings.  It is from this swirling mass that Pisces needs to find meaning, definition and direction.  It was also from a swirling mass of everything and nothing that the big bang was meant to have happened and we had the beginning of a new universe.

Without boundaries, I’m finding myself more fearful, and more anxious. I’m standing still and I’m putting on weight. I’m writing, but I’m not actively marketing, actively networking, actively doing anything to sell more books. In a way I’m scared that the dream I’m chasing to be a full-time author won’t come true – and then what? By not doing the things that I know I need to do in order to create success, I don’t need to discover if I can be successful. It probably makes no sense to you, but to me it does.

Weirdly I was more courageous when everything was unsafe and unsettled. I’m inspired, but I’m not inspired. I suspect that in order to make sense of all that I need to go further into myself – and this New Moon is the right time for that.

The Pisces New Moon is spiritual, creative and immensely emotive. It’s the point where the other world meets the real world – where that which is hidden becomes exposed.

It’s that point where boundaries are beautifully blurred between what you know and what you know.

If you have a creative project you have been delaying on, or making excuses for, now is the time to listen to what you know in your heart, what you know intuitively. Leave the head stuff for later – much later.

With this much energy, there is no ignoring the fact that one part of your life requires a dream, is asking for inspiration, needs to, well, trust.

I was listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs (a BBC podcast) the other day with George Michael. In it, he said (something like) as much as he’d subconsciously tried to sabotage himself he never doubted his talent. That it was something that would get him to where he needed to be – no matter what was going on inside and around him. His MC was in Pisces.

Wherever Pisces is in your chart is where this blurring will be in your life. It’s also where you need to trust yourself. Escape from your every day into it, take sanctuary in it, go with it. Let your imagination roam free. Float into the beyond. Follow your dream – even if it means coming face to face with your biggest fears in the process.