It's very late but I don't think I'm going to sleep any time soon. My lover is out of town, and I'm here alone in the apartment.

I go and look out the window. The city is still, no cars on the street. A moth, fluttering in the street light, is the only thing travelling tonight. Across the street, at the Red Cross clinic, the Ecuadoran flag ripples in the night breeze. The sky is cloudy: no stars.

A couple of days ago, I downloaded some freeware which gives me an astrological wheel for the moment, the current time and place. It's been interesting, as I've been able to track which planets are rising or setting, through the day and the foggy Quito nights.

But I can't go look at it because my computer went on the blink today. This adds to my feeling of isolation tonight. I can't move data around, with the attendent feeling that I'm in control of my world.

I'm just glad that I still have electric light. Maybe if I didn't, this night vigil wouldn't make sense. Maybe I'd give it up, surrender to sleep, let the shadows swallow me.

But I don't. I turn the radio up loud, and listen to perky Andean pipes. The incongrous chorus repeats, "Soy solito," but after a few lines, I gather it's a drinking song. We're all alone, so be cheerful about it. Sing and drink.

In the absence of rum and drinking buddies, I turn on more lights. I create an island of human intention, a space of consciousness in this city full of dreamers.

I can almost hear the dreams swarming out there, a wild buzzing of hopes and fears and needs. They dart hungrily from place to place, fertilizing everything they touch.

You see, I believe in them, and in their essential rightness. I believe that the spirits of the night, wild and free and strange as they are, are forces for good in the world. But sometimes it's hard to turn myself over to them. This is one of those nights.

I attribute it to my lunar nodes - karmic influences - in Pisces and Virgo. Pisces is the sign of fantasy, spirit, and letting go. Virgo is the sign of control and discrimination. When I go to my computer and rearrange data, I'm embodying my Virgo side. I have an abundance of information at my fingertips. I can arrange it in endless designs, with a mounting sense that I'm accumulating wisdom.

But wisdom doesn't come from data, but from surrender. In surrender is chaos and birth. It's the only route to the sacred. Why do I fight it so hard?

In March, the sun, Mercury and Uranus are all in Pisces, while Jupiter is in Virgo. So as I write this, on the eve of March, I know that the strangely blank computer screen is my introduction to the particular lessons of the month.

The full moon on the 6th brings us a Pisces/Virgo opposition. People with planets near 16 degrees of mutable signs will be particularly affected.

If you have Pisces planets, they are your ticket to a waking dream state. You'll have a month of fertile imagination, pressing intuitions, and colorful fantasies. Music will follow you like a puppy, nipping at your heels until your whole body learns to hum.

If you have Virgo planets, you will relate more to the pragmatic tendencies of Jupiter in Virgo. You will start exercising even more strenuously, and making plans for the herb garden you'll be starting soon. You'll become more and more physically solid. You'll glow with the health of a woman who fully inhabits her body.

If you have Gemini or Sagittarius planets, they will act as catalysts, lightning rods for the contradictions of Pisces/Virgo. For me, that's Mercury, the planet of communication - hence my computer problems. Knowing this is satisfying, although it won't bring back the dancing words on the screen. Still, my Virgo side feels better with something I can point to, a definite influence.

No matter what the zodiacal influences in our charts, all of us will feel the tug between Pisces and Virgo in March. All of us will feel the real pulling on one side, the unreal on the other.

The other night, right after my lover left on her business trip, I woke up with a start at 2 a.m. My imagination was scaring me. It must have been digging up some pretty musty skeletons.

I ended up in the bathroom with a book which explained that myth is beneath everything. It's our common ground, our Garden of Eden. (I realize that I'm using a myth to describe myth itself, but perhaps the only way to explain it is to enter it.) As we create our lives, we build them around the framework of myth. Everything - skin, lamp, blanket - is a symbol, and has a part to play.

When you read something like this in the middle of the night, it really gets into your bones. Your life becomes transparent, and the myth is revealed in all its neon brilliance. It's like an x-ray, utterly familiar and utterly strange.

And yet we can't live our myth unless we take on the patient tasks. We have to plant our gardens, move our bodies, heal and fix and clean and clear. And these acts take us away from the amorphous mythic plane. We come to believe that this solid environment is our true home. We move through it, effective and definite, making sure it conforms to our plans. Until the spirit starts agitating for flight.

And then we see our essential duality. Astrology deals with these dualities, and every pair of zodiac signs embodies one of these basic themes. With Pisces/Virgo, we skirt what is most spiritual, the non-self of the self.

Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac, and it's where we find all human and all divine experience within ourselves. As I look out on the city, I know that I am part of every dream out there.

We are all torn in two by every full moon. We are all torn in two anyway, and every full moon stitches us together.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com