A Message From Tulsi: Be Gentle With Yourself

I’ve been bathing with Tulsi these past two months. Also known as Holy Basil, because this plant is sacred to Hindus as an embodiment of the goddess Lakshmi, she doesn’t over-winter in our northern climes, so I had to harvest all of my plants that were outside. They had such tall flowers that I decided to save them for my winter baths.

The scratchy flower stalks of dried Tulsi have the added benefit of serving as an efficient scrub, and bathing with a plant is a wonderful way to tap into any message the plant spirit might have for you. I’ve been appreciating her gentle guidance and support as I started a new job, potty trained a new puppy, and generally felt discouraged and overwhelmed.

I’ve been struggling this Winter Solstice and Christmas season in general to feel the inner warmth these holy days usually envelope me in. Usually I love the glowing, growing heart feeling that the season brings, as we turn inside, think of our loved ones and share blessings in the form of gifts, warm drinks and food.

This Fall and Winter have sadly brought seemingly unheard of new levels of violence and hatred to the fore. I’ve had to decline listening to the news, which then makes me feel guilty because I am worried I am just playing the ostrich with my head in the sand.

As I sink into a bath with Tulsi, I understand even more why I often prefer the plant world to the human world. Plants don’t know cruelty; survival perhaps, and a kind of indifferent interest in their own reproduction at times, but not hatred and not violence for the sake of violence, not this intolerance and unhappiness so thick that it runs out and touches everything in its vicinity. I dream of Peace on Earth, goodwill towards men, I sing it even, with all my heart, but I know that I turn to the plants to feel sane again. Humanity has lost the plot.

Maybe this is why it feels so hard sometimes to teach high school. What kind of world are these young humans moving into, and what will they be able to do in it? I had a bit of a reprieve the last few weeks of school as we had a snow day and then another day off, so I had more time for baths and self care, but this was sadly due to more flooding in my school district. Vermont suffered this summer from heavy rains and swollen rivers which ravaged the communities too close to the flood planes.

As the changing climate makes our human choices seem more and more consequential and tragic, the Earth seeks balance, and our landscapes change, inevitably impacting our ability to survive and thrive. I feel saddened watching the flooding happen again, just a few months later, though people were better prepared this time and perhaps some changes will come from the repeated catastrophes. I feel a heightened sense of sensitivity, as if the landscape is asking me to make changes in myself as well, in how the rivers of emotion run through my lives. We have to adapt too, and rapidly. Tulsi helps keep my nervous system regulated through the storm.

Her main message to me, and the one she wanted me to share was:

Be Gentle With Yourself.

My judgmental human mind is often the furthest thing from gentle, and perhaps this is at the root of humanity’s race towards its own destruction. As I mentioned, I started a new teaching job this year and as I adjusted to new demands and new students, I’ve often felt inadequate and ineffective, like everything I have been doing for the past few years wasn’t right or in alignment with what I need to be doing. I’ve been exhausted, at times out of touch with my purpose, and unsure of what to do next.

In other words, I’ve been judging myself too harshly. As punishment, I impose stress on myself, as if it is a means of achieving what I need to achieve. I know that this never works. Be Gentle With Yourself, Tulsi whispers in the bath, in my tea. Never mind about the destructive nature of the mind. Relax with me. And she’s right, that’s the only way to counter our current frenzied movement forwards. Slow down. Breath. Be present. Light a candle. Stay in and read.

Full Moon in Cancer altar

And now we’ve had our last Full Moon of the year, this Cold Moon in Cancer that feels like an extra push towards more empathy with myself, more cocooning and rest. I am reconnecting with home, praying to Artemis at my altar (she is associated with Cancer), and thinking of the coming year not as something to progress through, but as something to ease into with clarity, like Diana as she aims the arrow in her bow, with her faithful dogs. I certainly have those. They teach me to rest too.

Pixie and Merlin resting in the Winter Sun.

The Virgo New Moon: The Fungus In My Nails and Giving In to the Details

The Virgo New Moon

Early tomorrow morning, the moon wanes to darkness in Virgo. Here, summer blusters out in a rain storm and I am getting ready to return to the classroom.

Virgo asks us to get real. Are my toes aligned? Do my fingers add up? All the small details of life can feel difficult and disorderly unless we let them fall into place and align.

I haven’t written a cosmic blog post in almost a year! It’s the rain storm that stopped me from rushing home. I got a too-sweet milky tea and a lemon bar in the cafe down the street and I’m sitting in my Flower Essence studio waiting it out, after a day of in-service, meetings and various levels of fear, collaboration, anxiety, sharing and planning.

New Moon Intentions & Messages

Yes, I do have a Flower Essence studio now! Did I last November? I think I was just moving in. I now have a place to see people in person for a Flower Essence consultation, if they are in northern Vermont, and a place to go to write and sit and just be. I don’t come as often as I would like, but a good New Moon intention for me would be to come more often, and to write.

The lesson of this New Moon came to me as I was walking through the door of the building that my studio is in:

“Feel into the way things are, not the way you want them to be”.

Just as the pesky details of life can feel like too much to handle at times, sometimes these very same details can remind us of the contours of a reality that we may be struggling against or denying.

Listening to the Details

As my lack of blog updates suggests, becoming a high school teacher has been filled with many, many pesky details that I never quite feel able to control or manage. My lesson plans, the kids in my class, their needs, my needs. Then there was my wedding: the planning, the people, the flowers, the venues, the vendors, the invites. I never thought I’d do either thing, teach in high school or plan a wedding, but I guess this is where the details wanted me to be.

All last year I was struggling to catch up with myself. Then Summer came and I breathed out. Now, before I begin again, I need to consider what I learned from last year. I am going to ask my students the same thing. We could all journal on it for the New Moon. What did we learn from where we have been?

Fingernail Fungus

My nails clue me in. For about a year I have had what I thought were nail problems on my hands due to gardening. My nails were always dirty and a bit smelly and strange. I tried cleaning them. I got nifty manicures that my teenage students gave me compliments on. This may not have been a good thing, since the last time I went, just to remove a gel manicure I didn’t want anymore, the manicurist, a beautiful woman from Kazakhstan, told me that I have nail fungus, in all my nails! And apparently you can catch it from nail salons. She’d never seen it so bad. How embarrassing. I was shocked and dismayed, but also relieved to finally have a diagnosis. I must have been exposed to it somehow, I think probably in the shared gloves I wore when I worked on the farm a few years ago.

Wedding Bands, a little bird and Fingernail Fungus!

My manicurist was not optimistic. The treatment will be long she said. It might never go away. I’ve been soaking with Epsom salts and apple cider vinegar, applying tea tree and oregano essential oils, diluted in oil of course, and putting my finger tips in lemons, following the advice she gave me, and waiting to see what happens.

I also got curious.

I’ve always been rather vain about my hands, fingers and nails. They taper elegantly and my nails were always short but strong. I liked them. I remember feeling so dismayed when they started to look strange. But I ignored it. Maybe it was just age? I should have paid attention to the details.

Since my diagnosis, I have been looking for the meaning of this particular ailment. Apparently it is pretty common. I like to use Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life book for the metaphysical meaning of symptoms.

For her, what do the fingers symbolize? The details of life. The hands, grasping, holding things. Fungus represents stagnating beliefs and a refusal to release the past, letting the past rule today. The nails represent protection. Putting all of this together, my ugly nails teach me a lesson. With all the changes in my life, I have struggled to release what I no longer need (funnily enough, I will have a yard sale this weekend, the third one this summer, so I can still keep practicing that one). In the past, fear ruled my life, but it no longer needs to. I can work with some new beliefs, which I know from experience will help my fingernails heal when used in conjunction with the physical treatments I am working with.

I am safe. I can protect myself. I am protected.

I take care of the details of my life without worrying and comparing, wondering and stressing. The devil is only in the details if I allow him to sit there and grin at me.

I see that wanting things to be different than they are causes me more worry and stress. Instead, I can step into my current reality like a new dress. The Moon helps.

The Desire for Perfection

When I think of Virgo, I also think of the desire for perfection. Virgo is an Earth sign, and she wants things completed and whole. I have always struggled with wanting things to be perfect. I never feel I can attain perfection, in anything I do. I remember, as a child in school in Switzerland, a country of perfection if ever there was one, when a teacher asked me to draw the other side of a photographed face. My side came nowhere near reflecting the original. I also feel that I can never reproduce something I have done in exactly the same way. I am messy and my life never looks like perfection, even on the channels that are supposed to manufacture it. What if my desire for perfection was already satisfied? The Virgin is whole and perfect because she is the way she is. She doesn’t have to do anything.

Enjoy this precise Virgo energy, your harvests and the beginning of fall!

Are you interested in tuning into the natural cycles and the plant spirits to tend to your life’s details? You can book an exploratory call with me or schedule a flower essence consultation by booking on my website or reaching out to me.

I’ll write again soon!

Have a beautiful New Moon!

Amy

Taurus Full Moon - End of Scorpio Eclipse

Image by Zoltan Tasi

Taurus can be centering and grounding, but our need for comfort can make us feel anxious in such times as these.

I’ve been feeling dizzy sometimes when I rise, as if the material world we are in cannot stay, and cannot bear me away. How can I find my balance in between? Can the Earth still hold us?

We are still moving around the Sun, we are moving into the dark part of the year. We are waltzing gently towards whatever new world we are creating with our cumulative decisions.

As a teacher, I am more a part of society than I have ever been. I miss my free time and my ivory tower, but that no longer feels possible, as if my learning now means I must be more a part of this world. No more studying old manuscripts (I got my PhD in Switzerland studying one in 2016) or writing poems to the Moon. The kids need me. Or so part of me feels.

The World needs me, I hear on the wind. I do miss the time I used to have, but then, I wasn’t really conscious of it when I had it.

The old ones are dying, the trees once told me, pre-pandemic, and now this takes on new meaning. The trees were not only talking about the trees. What are we building to take the place of all that is dying? I ask myself.

The Moon early this morning was full in Taurus, where it was eclipsed by the Sun.
This Full Moon was a blood moon, did you see it slowly turn to red?
Here I was sleeping warm in my bed, and the sky was cloudy I think.
I didn’t rise to greet the Full Moon in red bloom. But I felt it there in the sky.

Today I’ve been working remotely and reading about eclipses and the change they bring, wondering, now that the Moon is in Gemini, at how the change came swiftly yesterday. I was in one of the high schools I teach at and I was ready to finish out the days before Thanksgiving break, when we got an urgent email followed by an announcement that we’d be closed for the next few days.

The COVID cases are as high as they have ever been in my small corner of Vermont and the elementary schools especially can’t cope with all the absences and the lack of staff. So here it is a Friday and I don’t have to teach at all next week. My students have been warned they may go remote, and as much as I am glad for this break, I realize, I will miss them.

Life is funny that way, isn’t it? The way you can be so fixated on what isn’t going right with your current situation, but then it changes and you miss the way it was. Well, I don’t think I will really miss the teaching full time so much next week. I am exhausted, and as I said above, unsure of even how to feel my feet, but I hope all the kids I won’t see will be okay.

End of Scorpio - the Sun moves to Libra soon, and I’ll be glad to move to balance from darkness. My darkness shows up as a holding near of what I am afraid to lose. I realized today that my jealousy often simply reflects fear from times when my open-hearted giving nature was not treated in kind. Ah. This brings a kind of relief, and if that’s the kind of realization and release this Full Moon brings, I will take it.

I realized recently that my rising sign was not Scorpio. This also softens how I observe my own shadow. I’m a Sagittarius rising now.

This Full Moon and Eclipse was not on my rising sign axis. The aspect wasn’t really touching anything in my chart, but I realize Scorpio is my 12th house, hence my feeling of darkness and endings at this time of year are not surprising, since the 12th house is the last house on the sky’s wheel. My sky is ending. But now, something begins. Something new, out of the darkness. Last weekend I planted garlic.

How was this lunation for you? Are you curious about it? I’d love to talk with you. Drop me a line for an astrological chat or a card reading. I offer a free call to discover plant coaching, tarot and astrology readings. I have a bit more time next week , especially Monday.

Friday night blessings.

May your strong love continue to reveal and heal your shadow.

Amy

From Ashes to Flowers: A Full Moon in Libra

Since the New Moon in Aries, I've been contemplating more messages from the fire, namely, ashes. 

When you have a wood fire, you have a lot of ashes. I've been asking myself, can I compost them? Can I put them on the garden? Can I use them to make soap? What can I possibly do with so many? 

And when will the fire burning season come to a close and when will I be able to put my bare feet on the ground again? I did once so far this year, at the Equinox. We had a fire and released and sowed intentions for the astrological new year. We danced for Spring! Then yesterday and today, wind and snow. And tomorrow it will be 60 degrees again. Spring in Vermont!

Tonight, a walk home in the moonlight, the woods glinting back to me the stars and the frozen mud ice. The trees on my walk hold me like old friends. They warmed me all winter and comfort me on my pensive stroll in the dark or my romp through the woods. I recognize the ones I know. They don't mind transformation, from green to bare and grey to wood to fire to smoke. 

And still, ashes. To ashes. The trees don't mind becoming ashes. They have been teaching me about the ways that I recycle myself. My Aries independence wants to spring forward on my own, but this Libra moon whispers that we need others to make new soil of our burnt up dreams and wishes. Ashes are no good composted on their own. They need to be mixed into the pile in the right amounts. 

What does this mean to how I exist in the world? How do I offer myself? What do I receive? How worthy do I feel to give of my gifts and accept those of others in return?

Ashes are powerful because they are cleansing. Ashes clean silver and sweep up dirt. In the same way, my shadow cleans me. My darkness, once thoroughly burned, becomes the purifying potential of my future self. I can be washed clean by those parts of myself I don't want to see, if I am patient enough to observe them. 

And if Spring relies on anything, it is patience, as the flowers recently shared with me during a plant journey with a client. 

In the Garden with the Flowers

Swelling and blossoming into being
eating and being eaten
growing
sticky and green
we wait to become
who we are
when the time is right
we swell and open
becoming tall
Hollyhock 
Sunflower
Magnolia 
Tulip
Daffodil
stretching out
from darkness
we trust
we know
we will grow into ourselves
at the right time
a message of seeing
potential in the dark
we don't have to fight 
or strive
or stress
the blooming happens
and we are able
to allow our hearts
to grow into flowers
our special nectar 
our essence 
each particular flower speaking.

With the ashes laid in the garden, I prepare the soil. I learn that I only have to prepare the container for what comes next.

I've been offering more timed writing blocks during sessions with creatives. The timed writing container allows for automatic flow of the pencil or pen - too often we break abruptly from the inspiration and don't allow the strand of thought to coalesce onto the page. Setting a timer and writing creates a garden for my words to land in, a fertilized bed.

Next time that you write, don't hold any expectations. Set a timer and sit back and allow. See what comes. What message did you think wanted to come? How are you surprised by what does? When do you think the poem should end, and what comes after you think is should be over? 

This Full Moon was conjunct Venus and my natal Venus. I've been feeling a lot of expansion around my business and my Earth mission - my writings and my offerings. I'm have a few spots for three or six month creative coaching containers. What is a session with me like? 

Can I share how incredibly talented Amy is? First, Amy spent a few minutes talking with me about the herbs in my garden and which of them I had been connecting to lately. Then, we chatted a little about my writing practice and some goals I have around it. Amy led a visualization that took me to my herb garden where I connected with a plant I haven’t learned much about but felt drawn to. The ability to go deep was super-supported by the incredible gift Amy has in creating the loveliest of visualizations. I’m also learning more about this plant (Wormwood) and am looking forward to bringing it into my writing practice and using it to support my health. The final piece in this lovely session was getting a follow-up email that detailed all we had discussed. I can’t say enough good things about how lovely the time with her was. <3

- K.C. in Kentucky

My sessions are all particularly tailored to your particular creative and physical needs and may include meditation, writing, EFT tapping and breathing exercises. Make an appointment here to set up a free exploration with me:

Book a call

The next New Moon in Aries is the first New Moon of this solar cycle, so get ready for it. Empty out those ash buckets!

Lots of Green Love,

Amy

P. S. If you liked my flower channeled poem here, you might like to join my Patreon! I just offered Seven Spring Poems to my Earthlings tier and above. 

The Fire Inside: A Full Moon in Virgo

While living with a wood stove, I have learned so much about fire: how it burns and revives, dies and returns, burns slowly and steadily or roars and devours. The other night I dappened down the fire down so much that when I opened the stove in the morning, a puff of smoke escaped and the blackened wood gasped for air before roaring back to life after a whole night of waitings. This describes how I have felt this past week, as if my own energy were just waiting to be released, and the fire behind my projects rekindled. Poof! Smoke out, smoke in, a sudden burning, a warming of the surroundings and, I am awake! I saw the shadow of smoke on the snow. For now the fire burns inside.

I need to ground the flame. My dreams around this Full Moon have been intense and restless. I dreamed I was wearing a yellow apron. I dreamed I was back in school, learning. I dreamed I was teaching, which I'll go back to in real life this week. The night of the Full Moon, she woke us up when she was exact. The following day I drew the Hermit card. In Tarot, the Hermit card represents Virgo, and this noble Virgin said to me:

Look inside for the fire inside. Outer reaching only gets us so far.

This is a lesson from the plants too. The heart of growth lies deep within the seed. A reminder not to take too much in. All I need are a little light and air to blaze again.

In a session with a client recently Sunflower came to me. She offered me a golden oil which she poured down my throat, soothing and reviving me.

A Gift from the Flowers

Sometimes our fire inside can feel terrifying, obsessive and dark. Our addictions may come to light, those things that we burn for that do not do us any favors. Our desires may sometimes feel taboo. But your fire inside need not scare. Our passionate desires can light up the dark and burn away shadows, even the ones we'd rather not see. Your fire inside feeds your growth.

The fact that light casts a shadow remains one of the paradoxes of fire. Flame also produces smoke, a kind of shadow too, yet we were born to face this conundrum, thanks to the fire inside of us. We are both dark and light.

Our own shadows can feel heavy at this time of year. As I write this, I am sitting through another snow squall, witnessing March coming in like a lion. I'm turning to the energy of Pisces to sooth last month's excessive Aquarian energy. The Sun is in Pisces with Venus, approaching Neptune, Venus' higher octave, so reality may at times feel dreamy and watery too. We can allow ourselves to be rocked in these watery energies within us, our fire finding balance. The seed needs both too.

Believe in Spring

One morning last week the weather was so warm I forgot to stoke the fire. I was caught up in doing and I forgot that at this time of year, the fire always needs tending. The last few months have felt like that. My inner fire needed some tending, and this school holiday has given me that. I needed some time to rest and feel into the warmth that was growing. I needed to believe in Spring.

Flowers are surprising. Pictured here is an image of Cleomes I drew last Summer, strong and sticky. I don’t know Cleomes very well. I was pleasantly surprised when, the other day, thinking of my business and how I wanted it to grow, going through old notes, I discovered this drawing I had forgotten I had made, on a warm, sweet day, of a strange, exciting flower. I look forward to the blooms that will grow with me this Summer. I dream of connecting to them and sharing my musings with you in the coming months.

Let me know if you would like to discuss a Spring collaboration. I have a few spots available for three or six month one-on-one creative coaching programs, to support you as you rise into the Spring on the wings of your inner fire. What will the Spring bring for you? I am currently working on a creative writing project with a client and a green business venture with a curator turned entrepreneur. You can make an appointment to speak with me about your project here.

In the meantime, keep stoking your fires!

Love,

Amy

Activate Your Desires: A New Moon Party in Aquarius

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

An Offering of Home
Getting in the bath tonight to receive my New Moon message felt like going home. I haven’t shared news with you in so long. I feel detached and I’ve felt detached from myself and from others, how very Aquarian. But that is not really me. As a late decan Pisces with my ascendant at the very end of Scorpio, this New Moon falls in my fourth house of home and I came home to myself. How do I want to share it with others? I have been cultivating my offerings, waiting for them to bloom in their own time. That time is not now, with snow laying all around. The seeds are still slumbering. But I am showing up with an offering.

A Planetary Party
The Moon and the Sun aren’t the only cosmic objects gathering in Aquarius. You can find Jupiter conjunct Venus there, making out on the couch. Mercury is doing back flips off the arm chair while Saturn sulks in the corner. I’m not sure I’d want to be there.

Welcome Back to High School
Teaching teenagers in rural high schools brings me closer to the underbelly of our society, the one we don’t see on TV. I observe how we are raising the children who will carry the world in the future. I find it terrifying at times. My mind spins. How can I bring something to them, these young people who so often already seem brokien by a system that doesn’t do them justice, that constructs machines around them and then teaches them to consume so that it can consume them? The situation seems dire, and I read and overhear despair from others who teach them and from those who look to the stars. The Aquarian Age has not lived up to the youthful hopes and revolutions of the past.

Activate Your Desires
What can I do? In the bath a message to share came to me: Activate your desires. What does this mean concretely? I shine a light on the dark places I observe and ask my students, directly and indirectly, what do you desire? Most of them do not desire to learn French. They don’t desire to be in school. Today a student I passed in the hall asked me what my problem was. He thought I was staring. Sometimes I feel they don’t want me there, they don’t want to be seen at all, let alone be asked about their desires. What then? I speak to my own desires. Even the small ones deserve my attention - a square of chocolate, a cup of tea. One small, conscious desire equals many large diffuse desires or endless cravings for “other” and “more”. My big desires often rhyme with my fears, so I approach them gingerly and lovingly. I take my time.

The Queen of Wands
Today I drew the Queen of Wands in my daily tarot pull. This card is the card of my Sun’s position and always speaks to me of myself - Water of Fire - all opposite of the Air energies surrounding the moon and most of the rest of the cosmos. The current alignments are rare. I was in a muddle all day with what to do with all the mental energy, but the Queen helped me. In the bath I got it: Activate your desires.

The world is only as you want it to be, as you allow it to be, as you see it and allow it to be seen.

So speak to your desires.

Plant Wisdom
The plants teach me to speak to my desire in the moment, most often my desires, however unbeknownst to me, are formulated at the seed or cellular level to encourage my growth. Ah, the sleeping seeds now getting ready to burst under the snow, teach me that I don’t have far to go to allow the seeds of myself to prepare for the new growing season. How do I want to grow?

And it may seem like we do not have a lot of choice in the matter. I too have felt weighed down by the events of the past year, the illness, death and blindness of our society as we continue to run towards our own demise. And I could get caught up in the blur of whirring cogs in my brain, each planet spinning in air, but I stop myself there.

Maybe no one can tell me what to do. Others don’t have the answer and they can’t show me the path to where I want to go. Maybe I simply need to activate my own desires, and when I think this or write this an energy comes, despite the snow. We are buried for a little while longer I think, and I don’t need the world to conform to me, I simply need to let it flow, let the chaos be the chaos and work itself out.

A Pleiadian Message
The stars gave me this message last month, at the time of the violence in Washington, before Biden’s inauguration. I was listening to star song on my walk down the hill, specifically the Pleiades. It was my homework in a class I am taking with Jocelyn Mercado, Music of the Spheres, to connect with them specifically. As a singer of traditional harmonies and a student of the Middle Ages, celestial song never feels far from my conscience, but deciding to listen to specific constellations has brought me great insight, especially from the stories they carry. The Pleiades said, those sacred sisters, let the chaos flow and settle, work itself out. Another way of saying let go. I think that is what all this Aquarian energy asks of us too. Let it flow, go, all of the mess of the world, and I add, as the Queen of Wands, I’ll activate my desires, as seed children in my womb, and act on them. That’s what I’ll plant at this New Moon, my desires, for the kind of world I want to be in, for the protection and safe growth of the planet and the children.

Your Desires
How are your desires? Would you like to listen in? The plants can help. I offer flower essences, flower essence consultations, tarot readings and astrological conversations on your star chart and your aspirations. I also have a few spots for long term coaching if you’d like to engage with your desires as a creative process of growth with the help of the green world around you. Well, it will be green soon. Make a free appointment to discuss this work with me here.

Stay warm star children! Let me know how you activate your desires!

Love,

Amy

Plants Have No Past: Plant Wisdom for 2021

Showing up for the plants
I haven’t written a cosmic blog post since September and the New Moon in Virgo. Since then, I’ve had many new beginnings. At Halloween, the Celtic New Year, I got engaged. A few weeks later I started a full time French teaching job in two local public high schools. Since then I have been adjusting to this radical shift in my use of energy! No more endless days to contemplate my next steps as an entrepreneur! Time to tackle that lethargy that has kept me away from my goals! Teaching and a full time job was, ironically, perhaps exactly what I needed to take my online business more seriously. Here I am, showing up for the plants, after a few months of intense adaptation to my new role in the outer world.

Reassessing self-care
My work with plants has been on the back burner, but I’ve felt them with me and had some beautiful experiences and conversations with the people I’m working with. I’ve also had to radically reassess my well-being and how I manage stress. I’ve had to make some changes in what I eat and drink and how, and the plants have helped me along the way. Most of all, I’ve had to reconnect again and again with my inner knowing of what is best for me. I think this is necessary for everyone amidst rapid and profound change, and we have all been experiencing that.

Wondering at the New Moon
And now, this New Moon in Capricorn! The first of the year! Conjunct Pluto! I have been feeling the heaviness of the Capricorn moon for a few days. When the moon traverses Capricorn, this is my least favorite moment of the lunar cycle, whether waxing or waning. I feel heavy and burdened, and the smallest things annoy me. I’ve been journaling a lot, and feeling and wondering where this year is headed, for me, for others.

Watching Giants Collide
Cosmically, we have seen huge encounters, shifts and movement. At the Solstice, Saturn met Jupiter in what is known as the Great Conjunction. I didn’t get to see the encounter on that day because of cloud cover, but I watched their approach to one another on the days before. As you may have heard, this encounter in Aquarius marks the beginning of a new era which I think we all feel we sorely need. Aquarius will bring some air to Saturn’s heavy convictions, allowing us all to innovate in order to make the world a better place for ourselves and others. Right now this probably did not feel particularly airy and light, however. In November, Pluto was conjunct the two giants, for the third time, and Mars joined in as well, squaring Pluto three times this past year (I made a special flower essence to mitigate the influences of this particularly sticky alignment - Dark Hollyhock!).

Melting Beeswax
Today I’m writing from a snowstorm, as I melt beeswax and put away the Christmas decorations. The mice have taken on my sugar addiction, so I’m cleaning up after them too. The shell of a green Hershey’s kiss. A chewed open packet of Swiss Miss. We will all be cutting back on sugar in the coming months. I’ll be drinking and communicating with Cedar, part of our monthly devotion in the WEALTH community, that, as usual (synchronicity!) fits well with my current desires. I wonder what Cedar will tell me. I’ll be able to tell you about it at the Full Moon. I am also connecting more with the stars with a coach of mine Jocelyn Mercado, and her course The Music of the Spheres. Yesterday, walking down my cold hill in the dark, they told me to trust the process as the current chaos unfolds. Trust the process to see what comes, for better things will rise, though it seems impossible sometimes. Courage!

Listening to Plant Wisdom
The last strong plant wisdom I got in 2020 was that plants don’t have a past. I was in the bath. It was at the Full Moon eclipse in Gemini in November. I saw the plants all around me, supporting me. The flowers showed me how they don’t have to release the past because, in fact, they have no past. They grow from seed, always present in the moment of growth. Their energy is always at their growth points. They are always growing in the now. They have one growing cycle, then down and around again. They don’t shed skin as we do. As I write, I realize trees have a past. They shed their skin, but perhaps that is why we have an easier affinity with them. Flowers say, live for the day. This realization helped me move gently into change, for what am I, if not constant growth and change?

Taking a Ritual Bath
Though the New Moon is now slightly past, might I suggest a ritual bath for digging up and integrating the past? As you run the bath, think of all the bits of you that you want to slough off. Plant them in the water of the bath, like the ash of an Alchemical process. After 20 minutes or so, let the water run out, imagining that you, having dissolved them, you are releasing them. Your past has vanished, and you rise from the bath tub like some strange plant, new to the world, feeding off of air.

Dissolving into the Air
If you feel some fear at dissolving, at seeing your false sense of self drop away to reveal your inner, green, shining core, I’ve just posted a new Flower Essence up in my shop for you, White Foxglove. This beautiful shadow essence eases the way for us on our shadow path, allowing us to disperse, be everywhere, and find that the answer to our fear resides in the expansiveness of our imagination.

I wish you great expansion during this time of great change. Be light on yourselves!

Love,

Amy

P.S. I have a few spots open for one on one creative coaching with the flowers. You can make an appointment for an exploratory session with me here. I’m also offering some flower essence consultations if you would like me to make a blend for you. You may also browse the essences in my shop (and shadow shop). I also will soon have some exciting news about some new blends that will be available soon on a beautifully curated platform for healing products from Vermont! Stay tuned!

The Beans Inside: Finding Inner Peace with the New Moon in Virgo

Beautiful heirloom runner bean blossoms - Scarlet Emperor - will turn to magical, large purple-black beans in long hairy pods.

This New Moon in Virgo had me in quarantine. I got to go back for one afternoon to my garden, gather some squash, check on the blossoms and the beans before returning to my partner’s house where we were sheltering from the world in case we had the dreaded virus. I felt a little trapped. My own sovereign maiden of autumn did not feel resplendent in colorful leaves. She felt a bit imprisoned. The news came pouring in like so many gusts of ill-fated wind. I couldn’t do anything and I felt nervous at every unnecessary interaction. I found it hard to relax, though I had all the time in the world and all of my needs were being met.

On the day of the New Moon, I played the role of the grumpy maiden. I could not see clearly enough to write my lunar download, but I did take a bath and I did sit in some mists which ultimately lifted, or are lifting, on my way to composure and peace. How are you currently finding peace?

Mars Square Saturn and Pluto
Mars is currently retrograde, moving backwards towards ever closer squares with Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn. These aspects were trine the New Moon. A trine is a gentle aspect, and this one probably shed a gentle shadow on how the Mars Retrograde square might be affecting you. I hope you had the time to reflect on this and see behind the veil you may have felt with this New Moon. I have felt the Mars/Pluto square generally as a kind of ennui; j’en ai marre, you would say in French. A fed-upness with the way things are yet an inability and an unwillingness to take action. This has forced me to consider my own patterns of self-sabotage and unwillingness to seek help or take advice. I’ve focused on finding enjoyment in this feeling of stuckness. A few weeks ago, when the Mars/Pluto square was first exact, I made a Hollyhock flower essence which helps me see these patterns of resistance to positive action in myself and in others.

Hollyhock Flower Essence, made especially for the Mars/Pluto square, up in my shop soon.

How am I getting mired in shadow? What do I need to do to move forwards? How can I help others? As usual, the flower brings clarity when I take this flower essence - I’ve taken it as I write this! Let me know if you would like some to work with during this transit.

Heavier and Heavier
Mars square Saturn bares down on us heavily as well, maybe even more so since the planet Saturn is closer to our Sun. We will feel this pressure through October. It’s been a while since I’ve focused on my own Saturn work, necessary work I think for all those of us incarnated here in the material. Saturn represents Time and reminds us of our limits. We can work with him by developing a pattern to our activities. Lately though I have felt like I don’t want to be too strict with what I require of myself. Saturn stifles Mars’ natural energy for action. How can I work with my limitations in an encouraging way?

Inner Child Work
Lately a new friend in a tarot session suggested that I touch base more often with my inner child, to make sure she feels okay about the actions I am taking (the session was lovely! Thank you Holly! Find her on Instagram @rainbow.time.apothecary). Maybe I can temper a conflicted Saturn, who feels somewhat bound in Capricorn, with my childishness, with playfulness? Maybe I can add variety to my days, even if I am stuck at home or limited because I need to make money in certain ways. Maybe I can just approach my whole life more playfully, as a game I must play. I can follow the rules of course, one must, but I can also take pleasure when pleasure becomes available, or make my daily grind pleasurable by perceiving it that way.

Change Within Change
So much change reverberates right now through the world, and within this we find ourselves in a season of change. Summer cools and fades to Autumn. I recently learned that the colonizers of the “new world”, which we now call New England, renamed Autumn “Fall” because the leaves fall, and they do, dramatically. Currently they are just beginning to blush to red. Fire lights the trees. In the West, fires are still burning, in brighter colors, more alive, ushering in rapid change. This feels painful, like molting skins in a molten land. I think anyone who feels connected to the land feels this too. I want to trust the Earth and where we are all going, but I feel raw and stripped, with not much to hold on to. I think of the seeds that will grow, their hard casings released by fire, and know that this season fills a necessary role in our planetary evolution. We just have to tow the line. And harvest. We must harvest.

Harvesting Beans
As I sat down to write today, a day after the New Moon in Virgo when she is already waxing in Libra, I thought of the peas in their pods, of the purple pole beans that are still growing and swelling outside on their vines. They are still flowering, offering their small red cushions to the bees. I sit writing in a careful, protected space I made during these indoor days, a place to write and read and knit and meditate. We all need this kind of inner sanctum. I know how to build one no matter where I am because I built one in my own breast. Just like the beans that are still swelling in their envelopes, we need to build ourselves safe spaces in which our seeds may grow.

Inner Work, Inner Peace
Summer teaches us how express ourselves while winter teaches us how to move inside. From here, we can observe ourselves, our mental make up, our neuronal connections, and decide which ones to favor and which ones to lay aside. We can also play with them and change them! In June I joined an online community called WEALTH, run by Caroline Elliot and her husband. I learned an amazing and enjoyable form of shadow integration from Carolyn called Existential Kink. She has written a book on the topic and started this community for other thought leaders who want to work with inner alchemy to change themselves and ultimately the world. I highly recommend getting involved if you want a wonderful platform and new friends to play with. You can apply to join now. This kind of inner work, no matter the situation you may find yourself in, brings a sense of inner peace because it teaches you how to, step by step, embrace all your inner shadows, all the little complex beans and seeds that line your being. I can just do the work and watch them swell. I don’t need to stress about outcome, I just know that the more I plant myself, the stronger and more true to myself I will become.

If you enjoyed this essay and want to know more about my work, make a free appointment with me today. I help people who grieve their lost Earth connection find their creative flow again.
You can download my free guide to plant communication here.

The Full Moon in Pisces: Full Artistic Expression

A painting by Lorre Strain Welsh

An Artistic Life

This Full Moon had me on vacation, thinking about the artistic life. I am spending time with my partner’s mother who is an artist in her 90’s. Her house is filled with a lifetime of paintings and artwork that embody her devotion to her craft. She still sits in the corner and paints. Her paintings are often tributes to her large family: she also has 5 kids and three times as many grandkids. Her life-long productivity impresses me, and has me thinking about how I want to spend the rest of my days.

Essential Purpose

I was able to ask her a few questions about her practice. The first thing she said was that she always knew she would paint and draw, she was born to do these things. Feeling this purpose in your artistic expression is essential. Similarly, I always knew I would write. What is your “I always knew” form of expression?

Essential Practice

We need to listen to this calling daily and take action, building up our practice in small ways, and in this way building up the material results of our practice too. Like a matriarch surrounded by her children, she must feel full and proud to be surrounded as she is by her paintings, the fruit of her labor. She said she always made it a priority, even though it wasn’t always her husband’s priority and may have cramped his style.

Perfection Isn’t Human

On the difficulty that arises when we seek the perfect, she said that perfection isn’t human. We talked about embracing the flaw. Imperfections become an element that draws attention to our very human acts of creation. We need not let the constraints of others constrain our own work. Watching her teaches me that we can dare to be our own imperfect forms of creation.

A Full Moon of Full Emotion

With this creative inspiration in the background of the deep rest of my vacation, this Pisces Full Moon spoke to me of feeling the fullness of emotion, and in this fullness, learning to let the feelings go. Letting things go means feeling them fully, noticing what I put into myself to feel full, and allowing myself to feel the full feelings.

Feeling Feelings

The feelings that make me feel full aren’t always desired feelings. I’m learning to allow myself to feel the pleasure, itself a kind of fullness, of feelings I’d rather banish to some far and distant part of myself. If I banish feelings, I can’t feel them fully, and I can’t let them go. This is why shame is so harmful to us. Shame keeps us from feeling things fully, and thus from fully processing and releasing difficult experiences. They build up in our psyche and then we can’t even begin to know what it is to feel full of pleasure or joy. The truth is, if you are feeling an emotion, it is asking you to feel it fully, so you may as well do so without question. This doesn’t mean you need to act on it, but you can allow your body to hold it, and feel into it without judgment.

Safely Holding Emotions

We need to build a container to do this though, especially if we have trauma that has taught us that our bodies are not safe containers for our feelings. A relationship with another human can help us hold and process feelings, as can our relationship to the Earth. We can build the container at an altar, in the forest, with a tree. Find a safe place to go to in order to feel what you need to feel.

Watery Release

Pisces thinks the bath is best. Water takes on our emotions and allows us to drain them out, releasing and letting go. Or if you can, take your emotions to the sea. The sea constantly carries away what we shed, over and over again, rhythmically. You can ask the sea to take away your full emotion by throwing a rock or letting the sand run out of your hand. You can also go to a river or stream, where, rushing or flowing, your emotion will meander over stones and be set free.

Artistic Practice as Container

Our artistic practice can also be a container for our processing of emotions. We might not make art from this that we want to present or sell, but we can use our creative expression as the container that helps us feel and release emotion. Creative expression can help us heal painful emotions. Poetry has often served this function for me.

Virgo Season

The Sun is currently in Virgo, where it shines on the watery world of Pisces. Virgo is opposite Pisces on the wheel of the Zodiac, and in some ways this mutable earth sign contrasts with the fish’s mutable water energy. In other ways it is the perfect compliment. As I apply Virgo tactics to my full Piscean range of emotion, I have a model for the practical application of my art. Virgo season makes lists. I need to make time to do the things I want to do, the things I need to do, on my list. I need to practice my craft in real time, not just in make-believe or dream time. Finding time for completion is necessary, and this is what I might focus on in the coming weeks. I will have to quarantine when I get home and I have things I want to finish. As we move to the New Moon, which will be in Virgo, I can feel accomplished in my artistic expressions, and like the beautiful maiden in the stars, complete unto myself and whole.

Where are the Plants?

I realize I haven’t mentioned the plants in this download! Maybe it is because I am away from my garden. I know that my sunflowers have blossomed and my squash plants are still flowering and waiting for me to come gather their fruit. The plant life where I am is rather muted, by golf course and strip mall, but I know that this is all the more reason to go outside and reach out. If you want to do so where you are, check out my free guide to plant communication. You can sign up for it here. I’d love to talk to you about your creative process and you can sign up for a free talk about it here. I help people, especially women, create the container - be the container - in which their creativity can blossom.

A picture my niece took of my garden! The Sunflowers are blooming!

As ever, my flower essences are available for purchase and I can help you choose a personalized one with a private consultation.

I hope your Summer ends sweetly and your blossoming leads to many fruits.

Love,

Amy

Learning from the Plants about Individuality: The Full Moon in Aquarius

Feeling the Moon

As I write, the Full Moon is still in Aquarius. There is a three day window around the New and the Full Moons in which you can feel a heightened lunar influence. You might even feel lunar for longer periods of time, with more vivid dreams or anxiety. This Full Moon may have hit you with a vengeance. I talked to a friend today who said she had been angry for a week before it went exact and yesterday my mother was more worried than usual. I felt it strongly, in a restrictive way as well. This Full Moon, the opposition between the Sun and the Moon, between Leo and Aquarius, felt harsh to me, as if swords were coming down on all sides.

The Leo and Aquarius

Leo is a fire sign, all about expansion and self expression, and Aquarius is rational air, which feeds the fire, but can also blow it out. The Sun and the Moon were also square Uranus in Taurus, which may have contributed to this feeling of restriction. There was also a Mars in Aries/Jupiter in Capricorn square that we will feel for a while - two goats butting heads - explosions and storms should perhaps not be a surprise.

Seeking Balance

At the Full Moon, Aquarius and Leo were seeking balance, a balance difficult to find, between internal, liberated, intellectual activity and exterior, physical manifestation and attention. Uranus, the change God, was zapping us with potential that felt unreachable.

Peace

When I sat down to feel the Moon and see what she had to tell me, I felt held in the unresolved tension of these demands. Where was my peace within it all? I like to imagine myself at the center of the wheel, in the place of calm at the eye of the storm. Tuning in to cycles can help us feel this peace, even as the chaos of human life whirls around us.

The Wheel of the Year

Image by Ravenlove from Pixabay

On the wheel of the year we have just come past the first Celtic harvest festival, Lughnasadh or Lammas, celebrated around the time of the first of August, when the fruit of the seeds planted in the spring start to ripen. At Beltane, the Green Man and the May Queen mated and now their child, Lugh, begins to age. we are in the full bounty of growth, but the weather where I am is stormy and the sky is grey. The wind speaks words to me that feel weary. Still, we are alive this day, still blowing they say.

To Shine or Not to Shine

The Moon wanted me to talk bout individuation. Leo the lion, where the Sun is, is a fire sign. He wants us all to shine. He is the king, in power, and he wants us all to have a piece of it. We all deserve attention. We all want to be king. But Aquarius, in the air element, friend to the mental, reminds us there are limits to all things, and limits to this shine. Aquarius brings the sword down, pounds his fist on the table, wants the rational first and a solution to things. He wants us to forget this exuberant shining. Is there a middle ground? The Full Moon time, a land of extremes, often asks us this. Where do we need to find balance?

Individuation

So what is individuation? I started to think about it simply in terms of existing as a self in relation to a community, on the spectrum the runs from being independent to being dependent or integrated. The word process is important and comes up again and again in philosophical discussions of individuation. We are never fully individuated but always differentiating ourselves, or being differentiated, from what exists around us. We are not separate from, we are a part of something greater, though at times it seems we have collectively forgotten. Individuation is a process that starts when we are born and never really ends while we are alive.

Psychological Individuation

Starting a business is lonely…

For Jung it was the “achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious.” It is a process of becoming one, of becoming whole and entire. It seems to me can engage more or less consciously with this process, and for Jung it was certainly a life’s work, and probably never complete.

Too Visible or Not Enough

This Full Moon got me thinking about how we individuate and whether we find this easy to do or not. Are we protected when we do so, protected enough to grow? We wish we knew. We want to be sure. But we are often left on one side of the two extremes, isolated, either too visible or not enough.

Starting a Business

I had trouble starting a business because it was difficult for me to stand out. Why share something when there are others doing similar things? Who am I to share on this topic when others are doing it better and more fluently? What if I stand out and people don’t like what they see?

Copycat

When I was younger I was sometimes accused of copying, and this left a mark on me. Telling someone not to copy, or making them feel bad because they do, makes people feel that they should only share something if it is truly unique and special. That seems like a good way to keep people silent, doesn’t it? If only someone who is truly unique has a right to share, if you don’t feel special you won’t even try.

Self Worth

Feeling special comes from how we were treated while we were growing up and the sense of self worth that was given to us as children. I don’t know about you, but in my family, the emphasis was definitely placed on us siblings all being treated equally, which, as you can imagine, led to some problems and definitely didn’t help me understand how to express my individuality. And some people aren’t even given the chance of equal treatment. From birth they are told by society that their voice doesn’t count. It’s tricky to value yourself when the world around you doesn’t.

Paradox

To reconcile the extremes of community and individuality you need to embrace a paradox: that the more fully we individuate, the more able we are to come into community. Art itself, or any form of self expression, was not initially meant to demarcate an artist but to unite the community around a moment of channeled creation. Art used to be a channel that erased the individual who thus served his or her community. The artist was a mystic who knew how to blend and to become one with his audience, and on a fundamental level I think we still know this, when we lose ourselves in a play or a painting.

My Words Are Not Me

As a writer, I’ve always found it interesting that the first Latin word for poet was vates, which means seer or prophet. I’ve always felt in writing poetry that something was passing through me, like a divine wind. Other poets have felt this too. When I make flower essences, I have a similar feeling, of channeling a kind of prophetic healing message to humans from the plants. My words are not me. Sometimes people don’t understand this, but it isn’t just false modesty. My individual gifts are only special when I forget who I am and speak for something greater.

Creativity

Creative expression comes through us as through a channel. Our uniqueness is in fact what attaches us to the whole. The paradox of individuality is that we can’t be happy being completely individuated but must learn somehow how to reconnect ourselves to the bigger picture of the world around us. Without this grounding force, we are either too much or nothing at all.

How Plants Individuate

It’s not easy being green…

Last week I wrote about being green and I continue to wonder what this means. It could mean we strive to be more like our green relatives. If we want to be more like plants, can we observe how they individuate? Do plants individuate? At first glance, it might seem that they don’t. Their sense of the collective is certainly stronger than ours, yet I have experienced distinct, personal interactions with individual plants. Individual plants come from seeds which produce the same genes - they grow as a type. Yet each one reacts individually to the environment that surrounds them and faces individual challenges to their existence. It seems to me that plants have mastered the skill of being individual in community. What can we learn from them?

Mullein

Mullein, king of my garden

Mullein grows straight up to the sky. He is a magical plant, associated with both Saturn and Mercury, who reminds me to stand tall. His medicine is for the bones - structural, spinal - and also for the throat and the ear. A vast teacher, he represents for me how to grow vastly, deeply, and reach for the sky. Each stalk has its own character, and one or a few branches of flowers. Each flower on the stalk flowers individually, and over some time. For me he is the example of how to thrive in community, yet stand tall in one’s own individuality. There is nothing uncomfortable about each plants individual blooming. They take two years to bloom, and are sweet and soft at first, becoming harder and taller in the second year, making seeds and sowing himself readily. His root is long, smooth and woody. To me he is very masculine, and teaches how to be tall and strong despite what may be going on in his vicinity.

Water lily

Water lily, queen of my pond

I’ve also been contemplating Waterlily, growing on my pond, pink and round, a stark contrast to our friend Mullein standing up above at the entrance to the garden. Waterlily is utterly feminine to me, growing sideways, spreading out, living in water, made of earth and water, as opposed to Mullein’s air and fire. She is a nymph, Nymphaea is her name, and she is home to many green frogs who sit on her and seem to contemplate their life, much like Kermit did as he sang his song. The Egyptians believed that Isis was born from a lotus and her petals suggest that place from which all human life is born. What is her approach to individuation? Growing in my pond, each flower also blooms individually, a different size and color, at her own rhythm and in her own time, yet they seem to thrive together, expanding outwards horizontally, supporting and sharing the surface of the water where everyone seems to want to be.

Learning From the Flowers

Perhaps like flowers, expressing the highest energy of our type, we can lose ourselves in the creation of who we are and who we were meant to be. This places individuality in service to the community. It is only by losing ourselves in something greater that we find our true purpose. Both Mullein and Water lily, in their different ways, show us how to be comfortable as who we are in community yet shine in our own unique way.

Separate and Together

Perhaps we too ready to see ourselves as both separate and together, different and the same, at the same time. Perhaps in the right community, with the right support, we can thrive. I think the important thing is not to cut ourselves off from community in order to forge our individuality. Human society has made this mistake too many times. By seeing our our similarities, we thrive together and by supporting each other in our differences, we blossom. I believe it is possible to do both. I think that is what the Full Moon wanted to tell to me. The Moon encouraged me to observe the plants growing around me, to listen to the green realm and learn about individuality. The paradox of Leo and Aquarius need not be so harsh: after all, they both live in the same sky.

If you want to talk to me about any of these topics, make a free appointment with me here.

How do you individuate? Where are you on the spectrum of individual/community? How do express yourself creatively? Do you long to do it more or differently?

The flowers probably have something very special to tell you about your own process and I’d love to explore it with you!

Or sign up for a flower essence consultation here to receive your own potent flower message and personalized flower essence.

You can shop for my wild crafted flower essences here and here. Each essence for sale comes with its own message in the form of a poem that you can work with to heal emotional wounds, work on creative blocks and feel more vibrant and whole.

I’m also currently offering tarot readings! Intuitive guidance from the cards can help you navigate any tricky bit of road you might find yourself on. You can make an appointment for one here.

As a member of a new found community of magical people, Carolyn Elliot’s WEALTH, I’m sharing a post on my Instagram account, so you can follow me there and on my Facebook business page for more writing and offerings. You can also support my creative expression on Patreon and receive poetry, flower art, flower essences and consultations that way.

I wish you a beautifully balanced day! Between air and fire, mental and material, mind and body, may you be wonderfully integrated and fabulously yourself, at the very same time.

Love,

Amy

Going Green: A Second New Moon in Cancer

A Second New Moon in Cancer
Yesterday’s New Moon was a rare occurrence. Called a Black Moon, it was the second one to fall in Cancer, where the Sun currently sits. This happens every few years, and is a kind of recalibration, a shift in axis, one astrologer called it. It means that the next New Moon will also be at the end of a zodiacal sign. So we had a second New Moon at the very end of Cancer season, as we are about to roll into hot Leo, where we will feel more energized and extroverted. Cancer season was about turning inside. We wanted to stay home and tend to the home, we wanted to be intimate with ourselves and others. We wanted to nurture. We also may have wanted to put up a strong barrier, the armor of the crab.

Sitting With Paradox
So right now we sit on several paradoxes: a Cancer New Moon on the cusp of Leo, a tender new start at the end of a season, an inward looking soft gaze ready to defend itself at the slightest disturbance. We get a second chance to observe these oppositions and consider where we find ourselves on the Cancer - Capricorn spectrum. How soft or hard do we need to be? How can we be a bit of both?

At Home
The Moon is at home in Cancer, and I think we know where we need to go, but there is more work to be done. Yesterday when I meditated with the Moon, I received quite a strong message about the necessary changes that are being asked of us now, as humans, and what it means to become “green”. Certainly we know what actions we should take. There are life style changes we need to make, and the Corona Virus pandemic has spurred us along in making these changes. We have traveled less, recycled more, consumed less and reduced the need to produce all kinds of things (masks not included). We have driven less and the Earth, I think, has breathed a sigh of relief at quieter seas and gentler human activity. Our economy has taken a toll, but we always knew that this was necessary in some way I think, and we are learning to be resilient. We are helping each other more, and simultaneously tending more to our green Earth.

Being Green
So in many ways I see the drastic events of the last few months as having precipitated us into being more aligned with the Earth. What else can we do to be green? We can follow the advice of organizations like Green America as to which companies to buy from. We can take it one step further, live off grid, go solar, eat local. Some people think it is green to stop eating meat and we can do that. Some people say it is better to return to traditional ways of farming, and we can do that. We can choose not to have kids. I’m a proponent of these last two choices. We can support legislators that make environmentally friendly laws. We can use our power as voting citizens and consumers. But how much power do we have?

The Way of the Machine
I think in general we still want to believe that we can keep living the way we live and be green. We can use electric cars or live in ecologically safe houses and not change our lives too much, but I’m not sure this is true. It seems that we are still going the Way of the Machine, not the Way of Life, and that we are still looking for ways that technology can save us, but I don’t think it will.

Plant Lessons
Since the beginning of my plant journey, becoming green has been a big theme. In one of my first meditations with a plant ally, I literally was gifted the experience of being a plant. This changed my perspective on a lot of things, as you can imagine. I started to see plants as having something to teach us about how to simply be on the Earth. So what do they have to say about going green?

The Way of Life
In Vermont, it becomes green all at once, in a rush. The growing season is short, and so the green season is quite remarkable, dense and a bit overwhelming. The bugs are frantic at my bright window at night and there can be a feeling of overgrowth, of too much. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about society’s current relationship to the green realm as something that is “too much”. We want to grow mono-crops. We want yards free of weeds. We seem to want to pave over large areas of living Earth. We seem to want exactly the opposite of what nature wants. Nature wants abundance, and fulfills this desire abundantly, while we seem to want the opposite of diversity. We think abundance resides in reducing that which survives, in making it so that only we can thrive. But this logic is antithetical to life.

Systemic Change
What these thoughts tell me is that the current planetary situation isn’t asking of us small, incremental changes that will preserve the status quo but wide, systemic changes that will mean we will step on the world differently. We will walk more slowly. We will walk more, we will rely less on a dying system that is bleeding the natural world. We need to change quickly.

Going Green
So my New Moon intentions this month have to do with taking concrete action for creating a new world order which is based on Green Abundance not Mechanical Lack.

Going green isn’t NOT doing something, it is positively doing new things, taking new actions that actively create another kind of world.

Going green is living from the heart.

Green is the color of the heart chakra and reminds me of the way everything in the green world hums together, breaths together, lives and dies together.

Be more green.

If plants don’t speak to you, think of Kermit and be more like an amphibian. Consider the harm your actions cause, from a heart perspective.

From the perspective of your heart, consider what kinds of actions would create a different kind of world, one that is heart-centered.

Think with your heart.

This might mean we each have to do our share of healing, but we already knew this and now is not the time to shy away from whatever mess you find within and without.

We need to crawl out of our old armor and meet the world bare and pink so that the powers that be don’t know what to do any more, like the woman in Portland who faced down the militarized police naked. Make them laugh, make them crumble.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-19/portland-protest-naked-athena

While I was making a flower essence yesterday, one expressly for the Saturn/Sun opposition we were experiencing with this New Moon, I saw a pink beetle crawling away from its dark armor, left on a dying leaf. The beetle-like police will look silly eventually next to the heart-centered warriors besides them, whether at Standing Rock or in cities around the world. Green can’t lose, green wins, and though we must embrace deep inner and outer change, the plants can help us. And we can help each other.

Let me know if you are interested in talking with me about strategies to help yourself “go green”! You can make a free appointment here. I love this work and for me there is no stronger call than to help people become more heart-centered and Earth connected so that we can change the world we live in.

Lots of green love,

Amy

Walking Home with Fireflies: A Full Moon Eclipse in Capricorn

Fireflies
My walks home in the dark have lately been filled with wonder: the scattered blinking lights of fireflies that mime, for a moment, the stars. I love how abundant they are above my wild and rampant garden. They make me feel awed at the universe, these little glowing beings looking for love in the dark. Sometimes, in the night, they light up an area of my room, and I’ve learned that if all the lights are out, they do make their way back outside to their sparkling mates.

Stay Here
I’m not sure what I want them to represent for me at this time. I’d like them to just stay there, proof that there are still very dark places where bugs still rule, that somewhere, balance still exists in world, even if it is only a two acre bit of grass and forest. There must be other places like this that survive. The land that stretches behind me and down through a hardwood forest by stream to a pond where the trillium grow by a waterfall is conserved and this gives me hope in the future. I don’t know how long I’ll live on this land, but I do know I am thankful to be here, observe, learn, harvest and grow.

Full Moon Eclipse
The Full Moon eclipse in Capricorn was last weekend. I climbed a mountain in a serious mood. I brought a stone shaped like the moon to the top and left it there, on Camel’s Hump. Camel’s Hump, on the Long Trail, was known by indigenous people as Cat Mountain, and it does look more like a sitting catamount than a camel’s hump, but when you are climbing it it doesn’t look like much of either.The trail was steep and I was with my niece who was having trouble making it up the steeper inclines. It was the perfect thing to do on a difficult Capricorn Full Moon plus eclipse that had me wondering if I could release the habits and behavioral patterns I wanted to let go of. For me, the Full Moon is always a time of release, when I want to go with the movement of the Moon coming to fullness and let go of some of the fullness in my that I no longer need. With this one, the last of three summer eclipses, there were Saturnian energies that felt restrictive, with Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter also in Capricorn, sitting at the end of the sign, reminding me to strive. And I did, because goats climb, but I felt such a longing at the top, for other, freer times, and bigger, bolder mountains now far from my gaze. I had to rally myself to get back down. Mercury has also been retrograde, which brings a slowness to our work, which seems only internal. Mercury goes back direct in a few days, and Venus is moving forwards but she is in her shadow period until July 29th. I remind myself that all this work in the shadows, the feeling of moving up but backwards, is normal.

Striving Upwards
What am striving for anyways? Can I even hope to do things right in the eyes of my inner critic? The harsh judgments of myself and of others at the most intimate levels felt daunting (Jupiter) and dark (Pluto). I wasn’t sure I could do what I needed to do. Can I be present and aware? Luckily, later, in the days following the eclipse, which felt like deep decompression, the fireflies were there, light in both meanings of the word, keeping my eyes sparkling and my heart focused on the stars.

Deer Magic
Sunday morning brought another magical gift. As I was walking down my staircase in the early morning, I spied a dear bedded down not three feet from my house, under the lilac bush, staring at me serenely. It stayed there until the sun rose, leaving the magic of his presence like a quiet breath around the house. I felt deeply held and grateful for the persistent lessons of tenderness and beauty the deer impart to me in my corner of cleared woodland. You may remember my deer encounters in the Fall, and afterwards I wondered if it wasn’t one of those deer I had reached out to in my mind, or perhaps they just felt safe there, behind my house, because of how little I tended the garden and the gentleness with which I try to live. There is a mouse problem in my house. Well, I say a mouse problem, but it was one I fully contributed to by feeding my kitchen mice all winter. They kept me company. I wondered if perhaps the mice had gotten the word out, but perhaps the deer just felt it. No harm would come to them there.

What We Can Do
This long period of outer turmoil, pandemic, systemic racism combined with a general sense of doom about what humans do to the environment, has felt daunting to my attempts to put a positive spin on things. Yet what I do is think and write and build around me a small space of light. We can take action from this halo of grace. I guess that is all we can hope to do. Be like fireflies.

I Offer Support
Let me know if you would like any support while doing this. I offer energy healing sessions, flower essence consultations, and tarot readings. I bring my knowledge of astrology to all of these consultations. I also offer creative coaching with the flowers. If you are curious about what that is, you can read about it and sign up for a free conversation about it here.

The Six-Petaled Flower in Sacred Geometry

The Flower of Life
I’ve also posted a new flower essence up in the shop, Star of Bethlehem. She is perfect for remembering our starry nature. With six petals, she represents the flower of life, a powerful symbol that appears throughout the world on folk art and in religious centers. This symbol brings us peace and can aid in meditation. It’s beautiful vibration reminds us of our connection to all life, and the role we play within it. Flowers remind us that we come from the stars and that to there we will return, in our own time. In the meantime, we stretch up between the two, glowing and growing. Star of Bethlehem helps us remember this cosmic blossoming. She also offers us the support of Mary, virgin mother and goddess.

Garden Talks
On the next three Saturdays I will be giving a live garden talk from my garden on my local community’s Facebook page (Enosburgh Community Recreation). I will be talking about the meaning of the shape of flowers, and how we can receive powerful messages just by closely observing their form. I will focus on the White Borage that is growing near my carrots, another, five petaled flower, that reminds us of our starry natures.

Take care everyone, under this hot sun. Keep things small, listen to the small voices of the plants and insects, and especially to the one inside of you. Shed your light around you, however intermittently, so that it may attract what needs to come.

All my love,
Amy

A Daisy Crown for the Sun: The Solstice and a New Moon Eclipse in Cancer

A Wild Garden
As I’m writing this, the Moon is still in Cancer, taking me into a cool evening after a hot day. The garden has exploded in a typical Vermont way. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking, won’t it be nice when the leaves are on the trees, and suddenly, everything is green. The ground nut and other vines have strangled the poppies and I’m rescuing peonies from the rain. I’ve let the garden go wild, with just a bit of space cleared around my vegetables patches. I’m watching the three sisters grow, my dream of planting an indigenous garden here a reality. In May, my then very new love and I planted mounds of corn, peas, beans and squash. Since then I’ve been watching all of us reach into an intertwined life; a nice parallel between my green garden and my growing relationship. The pea plants found the corn without any help and now there is a single purple pea flower on one of them. They don’t seem to mind the heat. I think to water, and then see that they are doing fine. I weed the carrots. The lilacs have bloomed and the wild phlox, feeding what seemed like hundreds of swallowtail butterflies. I could take lots of pictures of irises, foxglove and the tangle of blackberry bramble and strawberry and blueberry bush which, in addition to feeding the birds, I hope will give me some fruit. In the morning, the bumblebees roll in the rosa rugosa blooms that grow up the side of the house. I’ve planted sun flowers. I feel thankful for this abundance and my life in my hot little house. I’ve started making sourdough bread.

A practice shot - the actual ceremony was not photographed. Photo by A. Blackhawk

The Summer Solstice
On the day before the Solstice, I went and greeted the Sun as a lover and made a daisy chain crown that I imagined I placed on his head, reflecting on how the flower is like a small sun, a miniature representation of a cosmic force we can only observe in awe. The Sun is reflected in the daisy, yellow center surround by rays of light, the circle which rays out. I made two round solstice loaves, a Sun and a Moon, and on the day of the Solstice, one which we brought to an Abenaki Fire Shooting ceremony which was magical even with masks and social distancing. There, someone shot an arrow into the Sun, and we gathered and talked as people must have done here long before there were lawns and strip malls. It feels good to give back this way to the land. I think it recognizes us, some of our words, songs and actions, and feels relieved that there is still ceremony as the sun moves from the longest day back towards eventual longer nights. At the Solstice, the Earth starts to breath out. I am reminded that blooming is brief and takes the effort of many, but when it is time, blooming is divine. The Sun says, every day is divine. The herbs gather me now - it was traditional to gather yarrow at the Solstice, but here it is not yet blooming - I gather clover and roses. On my walk to greet the Sun, a hawthorn bush peeked at me through the hedge, its blooms already swelling towards berry. The small green apples are hard and seem to blow up a little more everyday. Like the Sun, the daily dawn chorus is also divine. The peepers are done and the birds have the early hours to themselves, greeting the day with a jungle of sounds. When the Sun is up it calms, with only the sounds of the news of the day, warnings or cheers, preparing for heat. The mornings are wet and cool. I go for barefoot garden walks.

Self-representation
As I write these words that describe my green days, I wonder if it is okay that I am not visually documenting my life. I haven’t wanted to. I needed a break from social media. Things were changing for me in the Spring and I needed to rethink how I was representing myself. I needed to consider why my posts weren’t growing my audience in the way I wanted them to and which part of me wanted to be ignored. I decided to take myself out of the game while Venus retrograded in Gemini, leaving the night sky too. Five planets are now retrograde, including Mercury, so a turn to inner work seems appropriate. I have enjoyed the pause and not getting lost in the Instragram scroll. This also coincided with the feeling that other voices needed to be heard more urgently and it felt appropriate to step back a little because of that too. I understand a little better why it is hard for me to show up there, and to show up with my business in general, so I think I will come back with more consciousness around what and how I am sharing, and hopefully less self-sabotage. I was interviewed for a podcast (coming soon!) and I’m going to take a course by the wonderful Sabrina Monarch called Online Presence as Performance Art (!) and Venus moves forward again on Thursday, so hopefully my time away from the scene will allow me to infuse my online presence with a new energy. Maybe I am moving into being more comfortable being seen. This has been the focus of my magic for a while. This New Moon in Cancer has me wondering how I am showing up for myself. Is it with compassion and trust? I want to show up like that for the people in my life as well as in public, but how can I if I don’t show up that way for myself? The Eclipse, and end and a beginning, adds drama to the question of how I’m being seen and how I see myself, while Cancer makes it all more emotional. I’m aware of how my words do or do not adequately represent my inner, watery worlds. I want something new, in any case, and I’m working on it. I’m starting by opening my eyes and ears to myself. The outside world gives me keys to how best to see myself.

Being seen
As I turned into my garage tonight, I saw a doe and her fawn walking up the road. they stopped to stare and then ran, tails wagging. We saved a baby phoebe; it was flopping on the grass and I placed it gingerly back into its nest. The mother still doesn’t trust me though, every time I go check she flies back and forth peeping at me. I wonder if she knows she owes one of her babies’ lives to me. There are five little birds crowded in there, no wonder one fell. It must be hot. They don’t mind that I come peer at them. They don’t mind being seen. The mice in my house too give me clues to how compassionate I can be to myself. If I can live with them, I can live with my own fragile truths. I can put this out into the world and they become less fragile, more firm. How comfortable are you sharing your magic? I’d love to help you work on your visibility, as I work on mine. Do you want to share more of yourself but wonder how? Make a free appointment with me on my homepage. I’m currently only available Thursday afternoon and on the weekends. Contact me if you need to arrange another time or send me an email describing the kind of work you want to put out into the world and why you struggle to do so. A good flower essence for self-expression is Self Heal. You can buy some here.

Solstice blessings to you all. I hope you feel the wild potential in these painful times. The veils are lifting and shifting. Be kind to yourselves!

Love,

Amy

My wild garden

Trauma Rising: Blooming Into Change with Grace

The Full Moon in Sagittarius and Eclipse
Friday’s Full Moon was a lunar eclipse, the first of three this season. A lunar eclipse happens when the Moon moves into the Earth’s shadow, and I can’t think of a better way to describe what we have been collectively experiencing since the New Moon two weeks ago. We are all witnessing our emotional selves (the Moon) in the Earth’s shadow. Eclipses generally demand less activity, and I was laying low, resting and cleaning. The last two weeks have brought up a lot of trauma, both collectively and personally, for many if not all of us, and especially the black and brown people on Earth at this time, and I have wanted to step back from sharing. I have been keeping my distance from social media since Venus retrograded in Gemini, and I was pleased at how timely this was. As a person with white skin, it is not the time for me to seek to shine. I am continuing to be mindful of what I put out and take in. This Full Moon was also square Mars, reminding us of our personal battles, and almost conjunct Venus, who would like to soften all this strife, but also must allow it to unfold.

The Sun in Gemini and Black Lives Matter
As I write this, the Sun is still in Gemini, and we can feel all that zapping energy around the events in the United States, as the racist paradigm this country was created within can be more clearly seen in order to be dismantled. My mind has been filled with portraits of George Floyd and images of city streets filled with people demanding change. I am sickened and saddened by how much suffering the institutions in our country perpetuate and I am overjoyed that more black voices are being heard in the media. I strongly believe that we can use the division and pain we are experiencing to move into the change we once thought of as impossible. The Minneapolis police force will no longer be funded, the people in the streets are not just going to go home. Healing comes, as it must, however slowly, rising like a wave, opening like a bloom. I pray for reparations for disenfranchised people and social and racial justice. The plants who taught me how to listen teach me diversity too, equanimity, and how to bloom into change.

Trauma Blooming in the Body
Just like all the plants that are coming abundantly into their green, there is much work to do on a personal and a collective level. Just like the plants show us how to heal the Earth, by allowing what is barren to support life again and clearing the soil of toxins, we can reinvigorate our communities with care and communication. We can pay attention to the people around us and build resilience in ourselves and others this way. We can give of ourselves, our time and energy, to help foster healing. We can take time for ourselves to re-source and re-generate. Both are necessary, and we need to know how to feel into which one we need to do at any given time. Maybe it is time to go out into the street and support the change-makers. Maybe it is time to be a change-maker. Or maybe it is time to stay home and tend to your garden or your house plants or take a bath. Only you can know. But when we are allowing trauma to rise in the body, it is essential to take the time to ground and be with ourselves as well as others. For help in this process, and in the process of healing our collective history around the damage caused by white supremacy, both past and present, I am reading and doing the exercises in the book My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem. I am thankful to my teacher Asia Suler for putting me onto this vital work and I highly recommend the journey to anyone with a human body.

An Iris Flower Essence with Mary
During the eclipse, I made a new Iris Flower Essence, with Mary. I’ve recently started praying the rosary, reuniting with my understanding of the deep grace and love that Mother Mary offers, and she just happens to be in the garden of the new love in my life, a white and light blue statue, opening her robe to the beautiful blooming of the Earth. Beside her grows some Irises, gentle purple, blue and white, and they called to my love that day and I agreed, yes, today is a good day to make an Iris Flower Essence with Mary. Last summer I made a purple Iris essence which carries a powerful message of healing and embracing our own darkness in order to share our channeled messages. I think this Iris essence will also be in my line of shadow essences, but with the message of concors discordia, a concordant discord or discordant concord, a concept I have worked on a lot in my work on medieval literature. This concept sees the unity of nature as intrinsically diverse, and suggests that we can seek to embrace this complexity in the world around us and in ourselves. This essence carries the message of Divine Unity and the deep truth of the Trinity, which predates Christian teachings. The Iris embodies a three-petaled star, the one made of many, the three stages of life, the maiden, mother, crone; the unity of the body, mind and spirit. Three is also the magical number of fairy tales, the time it takes to learn a lesson and the number that allows a gift to cycle. This essence teaches us that diversity is a constituent of wholeness, that chaos can be harmonious, and that this is the way of the world. If you feel this message speaks to you now or that you need to ground it in your body, you can purchase it here. I’d like to offer it for free to anyone directly affected by systemic injustice, whether black or brown or struggling with the current events, or protesting and in need of extra support. Just send me a message: amy@enosburghessences.com
I’d love to hear your story too and find out how the plants have helped support you in any way.

Dried Herbs for Sale
I’ve also been harvesting and drying herbs at Flack Family Farm - Valerian for bath salts, Lemon balm and Spearmint for an herbal tea blend - Cool and Calm. You can purchase these here! I don’t know for how long. I’ve felt ambivalent about offering herbal products other than essences, since I don’t really feel this is what the plants are asking of me, but I know that many people need a good supply of organic herbs at this time and an herbal tea might be the gateway to more plant discoveries for you… I’ll be putting more up as they come. I am connected to the plants while I harvest and their message is not only physical, it is also spiritual. Dried herbs and teas are a remedy for the body and the soul.

Talking about Plant Connection
If you want to make an appointment with me to talk about working more intimately with the plants, now is the time! I’ll be busy through the end of June and July so make a free appointment with me here now. I’d love to talk to you about how fostering plant connection can inspire your creative life and help you discover your life purpose. I’ll be sharing my story in an interview on a podcast this week and offering a new free gift soon - a 3 Step Guide to Plant Communication - so look for that too! I’ll also be sharing more of my story with people who subscribe to my newsletter if you are curious about how I began talking to plants and the transformation this brought to my life.

Dear plant whisperers, I think that is all for now! Remember to love and listen to each other, to watch where you walk and to take care of your heart which is the Earth.

Love,

Amy

No Such Thing As Disconnection: The Gemini New Moon and a Message from Valerian

Wild Valierian - From Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis

A New Moon Harvest
This long weekend, I took a little more time to get my New Moon download than usual. Now it is already Wednesday and the moon is a swelling crescent in the sky. I harvested Valerian on Friday, when the New Moon was exact, and my house is filled with the smell of drying leaves. The root, white and tangled, smelled pungent and ripe like Spring. Some people hate how it smells. I loved it, and loved harvesting it. Let us know over at Flack Family Farm if you would like some! You can also just email me. Valerian is wonderful for sleep and relaxation, perfect for these anxious times. In my last post, I talked about how she helps us see the connections between the dark and the light. This week she teaches us how to heal our disconnection from the Earth.

A particularly beautiful Valerian root - you can order some from me or Flack Family Farm

Venus Retrograde in Gemini
Since Venus retrograded in Gemini, I have been social distancing from social media, contemplating how I want it to serve me instead of feeling like a slave to it, and I feel like as a result it is taking me a little more time to know how to share what I want to share. Venus is in her dark phase, no longer in the night sky, completing her 8-year-long flower dance, and like her, I wanted to delve into the darkness of my own sky, to see what there is behind the veil, and disappear for a while.

A Planetary Download
To get my cosmic insight, I took a bath just as the New Moon was exact. I actually took two baths for this one (baths are my grounding portals of planetary intuition - make an appointment with me to talk about how you can tune in!), one the day before, with salts, and one with my Valerian harvest. What came up for me was the theme of disconnection. Choosing to disconnect from the internet may be a way of coming back to ourselves, to draw ourselves within, and this has been particularly necessary at this time of social distancing. Meanwhile, disconnection is another type of pandemic, one perhaps more damaging to our world than the virus itself. Disconnection could be at the root of its spread. How did we forget, in our race to be more connected, the life-giving connections that sustain us, to the water and land, to the plants and the animals around us? When did we forget the care that is necessary to maintain them?

Disconnection
I believe that disconnection is fundamentally an ecological problem. That is to say, because we are disconnected from the Earth - as humans we experienced at some point in our long history the Earth as hostile to us and survival as a challenge - all other disconnection followed. The patriarchy arose, and we became disconnected from the Earth, from the feminine, outside of us and inside of us as well. We reject parts of ourselves, and disconnect from them. We disconnect from feelings, feel overwhelmed by them, and are no longer able to process them in the body. We disconnect from the body. We don’t want to feel the suffering of the past, in our own lives and in the lives of others. We experience “species loneliness”, which Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. As a society of the industrialized variety, we no longer feel connected to beings outside of our own species. I remember the feeling when I first starting working more intimately with plants that I was never alone. My loneliness disappeared. I was surrounded by an abundance of green friends.

Gemini Energy
Gemini is an energy I am familiar with because my natal moon is in Gemini. I want to learn a lot, I want to do everything. I don’t want to focus. You could call it the attention deficit disorder sign, and though I’ve never been diagnosed with that “disorder”, I do relate to how the brain functions with a multitude of sensory inputs. This Gemini energy can make me feel disconnected, with too many choices, and too many things I want to do. I am curious and a fast learner, but I can get overwhelmed by all there is I want to know. This New Moon was illuminating this energy for me. Mercury is also in Gemini, where it was conjunct Venus last week. My mind rattles with questions. What do I want to do? How will I choose? Why am I doing what I am doing? Disconnection is also a mental energy. We disconnect when we activate our rational faculties, when we analyze, when we ponder. And I wonder, do we have to? Is there another way of thinking that doesn’t disconnect but connects?

A Pandemic
Within the context of our current pandemic, many of us have disconnected from our routines, our daily lives of hustle and bustle. I was already pretty disconnected from this mode of living, and I don’t think I could go back to it, but not everyone can choose to do anything else, and this is part of the problem. Our current workaholic world of disconnection is the norm, a fait accompli, without which the economy and the society it feeds would crumble, or so many believe. What are our options? Throw out your TV? Get off the grid? Go local, local, local, that is what the books I am reading say and have been saying for years (see Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy or David Fleming’s Surviving the Future), and I see the signposts in my immediate surroundings too, in a sign in my small town telling us to stay safe and buy local; in the the way people are leaving free stuff out everywhere instead of having yard sales; in those giving away masks and making sure their neighbors have enough to eat. We need to learn how to grow our own food and eat the food at our doorsteps. We need to help and support each other. These changes are now happening in real time, and that must be how we change the larger paradigm. These are my Gemini thoughts, like so many shivering, shaking leaves.

A bath with Valerian

A Bath With Valerian
In my second bath, with Valerian, I asked the spirit of the plant about disconnection. It showed me a bed. There is nothing you need to do to feel connection in this time of separation, it said, except for to allow yourself to pass through the veil, to sleep, to feel your connection to everything that is outside of yourself, to feel connected to the non-human realms. Perhaps this is the ideal time to do so, to acknowledge all that surrounds us, in the dream time and in the forest, in the park and down the street, in the square of grass (for more on this listen to this recent David Abrams essay on the Emergence podcast).

Heart Thinking
Later I felt into the fact that often my feelings of frustration, of longing, of separation, come from my feeling of disconnection. In other words, I wouldn’t feel frustrated if I felt connected and remembered that I am always connected. What kind of thinking allows me to remember this? I feel this when my thinking is not just mental but heart-centered. Some say the heart thinks too, some argue only the brain thinks, but whatever science decides, I know that my understanding grows along with my capacity to use both in my daily life. My feeling of connection is only as expansive as the size of my own heart.

An Expansive Heart
Lately my heart has been expanding. Venus’ dance has brought to me a unique experience of love and balance, and that is what I am seeding with this New Moon, balance between the heart and the brain, the masculine and the feminine. I am reminded of how potently the world can reflect our own cycles of healing and growth, and that we are not separate from the Earth. She is always reminding us.

As long as we see the earth as something other than ourselves, we forget that Gaia herself is conscious and intelligent, carrying the instructions we need for restoration and healing, for creating a human presence here on earth in service to all life. - Chameli Ardagh

How do you get connected when you feel disconnection? Write to me, I’d love to know! I’m observing, loving and releasing doubts about my purpose and self-worth and moving beyond the idea of disconnection in my head and my heart, thanks to the flowers.

If you’d like to discover how flower essences might help you do the same, make an appointment with me here. With a flower essence consultation, you will receive your own personal essence, but you can also browse my flower essences and their beautiful messages here.

During this cycle the plants helped me understand that as we live sometimes in duality, we may find ways of embracing our polarities and those around us or in others. For another good read on the separation that currently surrounds us, and how to transmute it, see Charles Eisenstein’s latest article, “The Conspiracy Myth”.

I had lots of reading and listening suggestions for you this week! Maybe that is also because I am spending less time thinking of what to share on social media. The internet is a magical place when it comes to in-depth and inspiring content. I hope you enjoy them.

Would you like to discover how the flowers might help you on your own creative projects? Make a free appointment with me here to talk to you about it creative coaching with me and the flowers. I only have a few more weeks of an open calendar before I begin some temporary summer work, so book an appointment with me now. Here’s a testimonial from a satisfied writer I am coaching:

Imagine if you had your own personal guide to help nurture your creativity, build your resilience, pursue your passions, and address the challenges standing between you and your goals? As a creative coach, Amy is unlike anyone you've ever met. She combines ancient wisdom with cutting-edge practices. She distills her deep connection with nature into a tonic for the human soul. She has an extraordinary intuition for what we need to hear, how we should learn, who we can call on, and where we can go. 

Guided meditations with Amy have breathed new life into my creative process, and she has helped me to remove obstacles in my daily life that were impeding my progress. Her gentle suggestions, practical guidance, and astonishing insights have changed not just my creative output, but the way I approach my life. Amy's respect for her clients' dignity, privacy, and trust is a reflection of her grace, humility, and values. 

If you find yourself at a crossroads, at a stop sign, in a dark tunnel, or on a long and winding road, Amy will light your path -- and help you go farther than you could imagine going alone. 

- Amanda in Geneva, Switzerland

That’s all for now I think. I can’t wait to see what this cycle will bring for you and for me. With green love,

Amy

Plants Don't See Duality: Lessons from the Full Moon in Scorpio

Last night the moon shone bright on my walk home, marking my footsteps with tree shadow and calling forth spirits from the land. When I arrived, Venus shone directly above my house, a welcome and apt omen. Though in many ways the current times have been dark, I’ve felt bathed in starlight, a particular kind of lucky energy that’s hard to explain, protected and golden, like being in the vortex that the Abraham Hicks’ teachings talks about. My life has been flowing and I have been in the flow. I’ve been gardening and planting seeds and watching them grow in amazement. It feels like being in touch with the magic of life. I feel like I am climbing up that Wheel of Fortune after some time spent languishing at the bottom. These feelings run counter to many of the things I have been reading about this Scorpio Full Moon, and Scorpio energies in general. What with that and all the shadow work I’ve been doing, it’s gotten me wondering about what I am feeling, and the dichotomy between the dark and the light.

No Such Thing as Dark and Light
Full Moons are always a time to let go of what has been finished, accomplished, completed, that which no longer serves, what you no longer need to tend. Since the New Moon in Taurus, where lunar energies were at their most positive, you have tended to something, planted seeds, and now the Full Moon and the waning that will follow is the time to weed. Living all of this as experience, the light, let’s call it that which is growing, and the dark, let’s say that which is dying, allows me to embrace all of it, including my shadow, which somehow isn’t my shadow anymore. It strikes me in a way that there is no such thing as dark and light. That could sound misleading; we all know that that the sun rises and sets and that we are all moving towards death. We all know that death and destruction happen in the world, that people are currently in a dizzying array of life-threatening situations that try the soul, especially if we watch the news. Scorpio energies reminds us to gaze on this, so that we may contemplate the things that we may feel are unpleasant, but as I do I am reminded of teachings on the cycle of life.

The Cycle of Life
Today I just finished a book called The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary, all about Marian devotion as a return to the ancient, prehistoric adoration of the Earth as a Goddess, and all the ways connecting to this movement at this time of great planetary upheaval and destruction can help us live our lives more beautifully and share our gifts. I highly recommend it, especially if you have had an experience of Mary’s energy or have an interest in her apparitions, or even if you just want to learn about an ancient and beautiful way of paying tribute to the life-giving Earth. The voice of the Virgin in this book reminds us that life is never ending, it is a cycle, as from dirt and back to dirt we go. This teaching reminded me of another book I read a little while ago, Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Powers of the Dark Goddess which ultimately ended with the same teaching, that even our vision of history is skewed, as we are now reaching towards a societal return to the feminine, and what was darkness for women during these at least 2,000 years of misogyny and ecocide, was really only a cycle of change too long for us as humans to fathom within our short historical time frame. I like these reminders that the way we humans view things, as either good or bad, is a limited way of viewing the expansiveness of the world that doesn’t offer us many keys for finding solutions to our current problems. Take the current epidemic: if the choice is either to work for money or be jobless, there are not many options for survival. In a world where either you have a roof over your head or are homeless, there are not very many ways of imagining how to make a world in which everyone has the shelter they need. Again, I’m not saying joblessness and homelessness don’t exist, I’m just saying we have created a world in which you can only have one or the other. We can no longer read between the lines or define a reality that might be kinder to our circumstances. Stepping out of our dualistic perspective allows us to enjoy parts of life we might have hated and find sustenance in places we thought were barren. Plants are good teachers for that too. They have been around longer than us, understand the cycles better, and don’t know how to judge.

One Inside the Other
Interestingly enough, the zodiac holds its own polarities. The Scorpio-Taurus polarity, which we are currently soaking in since the Sun in Taurus is facing off with the Moon in Scorpio, is one I have been contemplating since the New Moon. What I’ve realized is that, as with all polarities, one lives inside the other. The Sun in Taurus season holds the intensity of scorpionic darkness, as it reveals the Full Moon opposite it. This is always the case with Full Moons, as a Full Moon always appears in the sign that is its opposite in the wheel of constellations. This Full Moon, Flower Moon, Mother’s Moon, Milk Moon, asks us to embrace the darkness of our earthiness - our sensual pleasures and the call of the darker sides of ourselves, that which we would like to suppress. Isn’t that what mothers do, ask us to love all of ourselves. It’s what the Earth asks of us too.

Letting Go of Duality
This Full Moon, I want to let go of duality. I’m grateful for cycles, for the turning which both creates and erases all contrast. I can be at peace with myself. For in these turnings, light and dark are both balanced. During Scorpio season, there will be a Full moon in Taurus, and I am reminded of how perfectly the world is made, the Earth just placed so amid the cycles and movements of the planets, sisters that move around the Sun. The Stars that make the Zodiac remind us of the mysteries that are greater than we can imagine, all of it spinning around us, deep in story.

Valerian
Plants frequently remind me of the non-dual nature of time and reality. They die, they come back, they tell me everything is one, they show me how to use the past to create anew. To them, there is always dark in light and light in dark.

Valerian, which calms our nerves and helps us sleep, is growing all around the garden that I work in. It’s the first root that can be ordered through Flack Family Farm this year. Contact us there if you want some!

Once called All-Heal, a name which reveals its treasured medicine, I think Valerian can help us remedy our tendency to overly separate the black and the white. Growing tall through the summer, its root can be tinctured and as we take it we can be reminded that all is right and well with the world, even though things may currently seem chaotic and scary.

Buddha Moon
This Full Moon is also the one that Buddha was born, enlightened and died under. Writing about Valerian and its teachings of equanimity reminds me of the story of that Buddhist koan about the farmer whose horse was stolen. How unlucky, his neighbors say. He says, maybe. The next day the horse comes back, with three wild horses. How lucky! they say. The Farmer says, maybe. The next day his son tries to ride one of the wild horses and breaks his leg. How unlucky, the neighbors say. Maybe, the farmer says. The following day an officer from the army comes wanting to enroll him in the army, but his leg is broken so he can’t go. How lucky! The farmer says, maybe.

I suppose that even with my own luck, the point is to stay equanimous. That’s the thing about cycles, they never stop. So enjoy what you can in the moment in gratefulness, and let things slip away as they go. In moonlight or darkness, we come back home, we come back to sleep, and to the healing, balancing action of our minds which can bring us peace.

Let me know if you are looking for any help from the plants and would like to discover how learn from them directly. I’d be happy to help you. There may be a flower essence remedy that wants to help teach you how to integrate duality and love all aspects of yourself. You can also schedule an appointment with me here for an online consultation and I will create a special mix for you. I also offer creative coaching with the flowers if you want a more in-depth exploration of your creative process and how to get inspired by the plants. You can make a free call to talk about it with me here. Sign up below to get on my mailing list and find out more about my offerings.

I recently did my first Facebook live and spoke about the messages I have been receiving from Daffodil. This bright and sunny plant grows from the darkness and reminds us how to be in the world. Look at the small, the in-between. Notice the balance that is always being made between death and life.

Peace to you in your world.

Love,

Amy

Daffodils in the Snow: Opening Eyes and Heart with the New Moon in Taurus

It snowed yesterday, and I plunged back into Winter, and into a dark moon internal landscape that was challenging. Snow on daffodils, clumped together, seeing in the dark. My eyes hurt. It was Earth Day. I felt darkness and instability. But today the sun is shining, it is above freezing, and the daffodils have regained their aplomb. I admire them for their resilience and tenacity. I’ll be like them, and bounce right back from a freeze. I’ll open my eyes to perceive a blue sky and the humming of life, if not yet of the honey bee. I’ll feel my bulb in the ground and feel the green stirring in my heart. This is where I am supposed to be.

Collective Grief

The New Moon in Taurus, almost conjunct Uranus and square Saturn, was last night at 10:30 EST. By that time, I had sufficiently attended to my own despondency to realize several things. One is that there is a lot of grief to feel, so I can chalk up my dark moon difficulties to the collective energies as well. A lot of souls are leaving us at this time. A lot of people are hurting more than usual. The Earth had her day, her 50th official Earth Day, and the forecast is grim. We have so far not responded adequately to an ecological crisis that we are witnessing and have been witnessing for as long as I have been alive, and even longer. I feel like a little girl who, born with a certain optimism about the world, does not understand the stupidity of her elders. The world is not as I want it to be and as I know it can be, personally, socially or societally. It’s not the choices I’ve made, it’s not personal despondency, it’s just a feeling we are not where we are supposed to be. Why have we not acted yet? What are we waiting for?

Another World is Possible

Well, apparently we were waiting for the corona virus which seems to be doing the job for us. The Earth is breathing a little easier. It’s still not the world I dream of though, the world of interconnection between all life, the world of listening and careful attention, with humanity safely back in its place in the larger scheme of things, but I’m starting to see my dream of another world reflected more widely around me. We are all slowing down. We are all taking the time to be a little more conscious now that we aren’t speeding around. This is encouraging to me.

The Work That Reconnects

But to get back to the New Moon and the grief I felt with it, there is a lot of grief to feel right now and we need to feel it to move forward. Joanna Macy, inventor of a method to reconnect us to the Earth and each other, The Way That Reconnects, speaks to this, and I know that in feeling some grief, in processing and letting go during the dark moon of just a little of the pain of the Earth and what we have done to her, even if I feel it in a personal way, even as it is pain that relates specifically to my story (especially as a woman), I am doing my part to heal her. I will keep healing her. Reconnecting means reconnecting to the pain that I have avoided, to the wounded parts of myself as well as to the pain reflected around me in the world, in others and in the plants and animals I see.

Uranian Energies for the New

Sparks are flying from all the healing we are doing, collectively and individually too. With the New Moon almost conjunct Uranus in Taurus, we can feel a special spark of desire for new beginnings of all kinds. Uranus has revolutionary tendencies, and we may set intentions at this time that are beyond our usual frame of reference. You may want to totally reinvent yourself. I know I do. And luckily, there is lots of energy there to help us do so. Can you imagine yourself shiny and new, emerging into the world to change it? This is what this New Moon asks of you. The square to Saturn reminds us that this will not be easy work. We need to strive and establish routines. We need diligence, not just passion.

Courting the Wild Twin

As I drove in my car through blushing pink yet still leafless Vermont mountains today, I listened to a beautiful new book by one of my favorite teachers, Martin Shaw. He talks about exactly this, the happy medium between the red and the white, the fire of passion and the goodness of routine. He writes of tempering, an old word that describes the appropriate mixing of the humors and I am reminded of medieval lessons on love. The heart needs to experience both the light and the dark in order to be forged into a diamond, to become the true lover. He tells two stories of the wild twin which tell the tale of this alchemical working, The Lindworm and Tatterhood. I realized that they are the perfect narratives to help me along on the shadow work journey I’ve been on for a while, a journey which asks me to embrace all the remnants of the neglected and exiled parts of myself, the bits of passions denied because they didn’t fit in or were too dark, and I’m starting to get the hang of it. My large and scary serpent, a gift of my rising sign in Scorpio, is no longer as threatening. When I’ve worked with Martin Shaw in person, he always ask us to consider where we are in a given story, as this can open up perspectives on our own lives. In the Lindworm, I’m the naked white worm getting scrubbed before becoming beautiful and whole. In Tatterhood, I am not sure, but I think my head is no longer hanging on a rusty nail in the witches’ long house. It’s a process in any case, and I am glad to have the company of these tales. I made myself a beautiful personal flower essence blend too, and the flowers help me tell my story in a new way, kissing old wounds away. Click here to find your way to your own soothing flower friend or make an appointment with me here to talk and listen in for a special blend for you.

Expansion and Abundance

The two words I got last night during a group ritual for the New Moon with another one of my teachers, Aeolian Heart, were expansion and abundance. The New Moon is traditionally a time of expansion, for the planting of seeds and the growing of dreams. Taurus reminds me of abundance and the earthy pleasures of this sign, which even if they are tinged with revolutionary fervor by Uranus, remain tried and true and stable. How am I taking care of myself at this time? How can I continue to do so? I pulled the Four of Coins tarot card for this week so I am asking myself what I am holding on to. This card is earthy too, and not always in a positive way, but this week I see it as a reminder to not give too much of myself away. To stabilize my own abundance before offering myself and my energies to others. This seems like a potent lesson at this time when we are being asked to look inwards and tend to our inner fires, however small or neglected they are. May yours move into blooming this Taurus season, and as the moon waxes, may you find ways to celebrate your own expansion into new aspects of you.

The Warmth Will Come

Shadow work expands your heart too. Maybe that is what the daffodils do all winter in the dark; they focus on their hearts, so that in the spring they can burst out into seeing the world with love, however cold it might be at first. The warmth will come, the warmth will come.

Blessings of reinvention and Spring abundance to you!

P.S. Make a free appointment with me here if you would like some guidance with your creative journey. Integrating our shadows unleashes enormous amounts of creative energy and I’d be happy to talk about this process with you.

Bulbs like Eyes: Beauty in the Dark with the Full Moon in Libra

The Pleiades, courtesy of NASA

A Spider Moon

Last night’s Libra Full Moon was a Super Moon, called the Wind Moon, or a Pink Moon. For me she is the Spider Moon. Venus looks like a spider in the sky right now too, in her web, as she crosses the Pleiades, and right now there is a spider installed over my bed, a spider hanging over my body.

Pluto Conjunct Jupiter

Pluto was recently conjunct Jupiter which can explain a lot about our current feelings of magnified darkness and deep encounters with death. The recent Pluto Saturn conjunction also in Capricorn brings heavy lessons around limitation. These are powerful forces moving us all. Yet the confinement of the current social situation has the effect of making me more aware of small, magical correspondences, of relationship, of scale, which also makes sense. Libra, where the Moon shone out so beautifully for us last night, is all about relationship and balance, and suddenly I see it all around me, the beauty and harmony of relationships between elements of the Universe, from the smallest to the biggest, from the interior of my room to the immensity of the cosmos. The globes of my eyes and the globes of the planet, the globe we live on. Synchronicities appear everywhere, and I feel woven into the fabric of the magic that is all around me.

Spider Medicine

Spider medicine teaches that we weave our own reality. I’ve been experimenting for a while now with uncovering my true unconscious desires underneath the ones I identify with outwardly, using a method called Existential Kink, EK for short, invented by Carolyn Elliot, which basically entails finding pleasure and enjoyment in those aspects of your life that make you cringe. She just published a book on it if you are interested in finding out more about it. This method doesn’t just make the darkness light, putting your pretty shades on so that you don’t see the things that repulse you, it helps you cut through darkness to the darkness beneath, and it is overwhelmingly liberating. It allows you to see the darkest desire behind the darker desire (the ones we don’t want to admit). I’ve learned, for example, that my unconscious desires for scarcity and rejection are always pointing me towards freedom and liberty. I want to be independent at all costs. I even want to be free of love and money. Yes, those things that everyone is supposed to want, and that so many people lack, especially now. Strange that at a time when we are in quarantine and our more mundane liberties are being taken away (with sometimes scary implications - read this article by Charles Eisenstein for more on that), I am becoming more acutely aware of my own true desire to be utterly free, a desire I think we all share on some level, the founding desire of the country I live in now, supposedly, liberty and justice for all. And we are all also simultaneously becoming more aware, if you weren’t already only too aware, of inequity at this time. Were our movements ever free if so many of us live in bondage to some institution, structure or history? The very structure of our society limits what we can do and how we can do it because of the aforementioned more conscious desires for, you guessed it, love and money. The picture people are waking up to is not pretty, but I believe this time holds great potential for new methods of existing in relationship to ourselves, each other and the world around us, if we can push through the discomfort and grief. I say “push through” but I don’t mean it. I mean be with, be with the discomfort and the grief, be with yourself, be with each other, stay there a while, and see what transformation happens.

Being Free

At the Full Moon it is good to plant seeds. My unconscious desire for liberty has planted many seeds for me which have led to my current situation of scarcity and I see that I won’t be free of this scarcity until I become appreciative of all that these unconscious desires have done for me, liberating me from the tyranny of my more conscious desires for love and money. In this way I am also more free. I’m one step ahead of the patriarchy, however it wants to paint me. I beat it at its game. I don’t have what it tells me I should want, and I can take pleasure in this. And there is abundance in this. There is delicious, tender abundance when I look at all that is in the space around the things and the people I miss. There is the abundance of Spring, for one, the reminder that everything I need is literally growing at my doorstep. There is the abundance of love from the family I see in person and the friends I see virtually. “Poor me” becomes “Free me”.

How Bulbs Teach Me to See

I’ve been contemplating the bulbs that are coming up around me, thanks to the mysterious fire force of Spring. The Aries Sun shines down on my bed and wakes me too, warming the windows and activating the flies. I want the Spider to stay above my bed because there are so many flies. I open the windows to let the flies out and warm up in the sunny spots around the house. The bulbs are waking too, and I’ve written two poems about bulbs being like eyes, seeing in the dark, feeling safe there, finding security in the scarcity. I think it is the Daffodils talking to me, waking up too. What else do they say to me? They tell me of the darkness that gives birth to light. I ask them “Do you feel the slowing down of human activity as you quicken into blooming, into life?” I ask them “Teach me to embrace the night”. I’ll put the finished poem of this dialogue over on my Patreon page for subscribers, but in essence they tell us how to appreciate the darkness and grow towards the light.

Purple Iris

Speaking appreciating the darkness, I’ve started to offer my line of shadow flower essences up on my website. These are flowers that have helped me in my own process of shadow work and integration or have communicated to me that they are here to help people process trauma and difficult life experiences. The most recent one I attuned with, Purple Iris, says it beautifully.

Darkness that pierces through darkness,

purple flame, light of spirit,

light me up, speak the truth.

Messages I receive from Source, 

divine guidance from darkness, 

expansive, I am able to share.

Sovereign unto myself,

I channel words of clarity 

from within a cave of protection.

I am not afraid of death.

I approach it for insight.

Clarity comes from purple light.

The Moon says, deep desires illuminated beautifully.
Beauty round illuminates you the desire.
I wrote that last line in the moonlight.

Be whole, be you , and don’t forget to talk to the flowers.

Love,

Amy

Oh, and make an appointment with me here if you want to talk about working with me and the plants to expand your creative practice or heal stuck patterns! I have opened up my hours and offer a free exploratory call if you are curious or just want to talk. The flowers have taught me how to listen.

Seeing Clearly with Clary Sage: Dark Rebirth with the New Moon in Aries

In the Dark
Here we all are, inside, changing our lives, and no one asked us about it. This New Moon brings us, with force, a newness we may not have asked for, just like this “novel” virus. We are being told to adapt. We don’t have a choice. In a way we are in the dark about what comes next. We are turned inwards, observing our patterns and behaviors, having to face ourselves.

A Dream Come True
In some ways, it feels like a dream come true. For how long have I dreamed of the world slowing down to the rhythm of our souls! I’ve slowed myself way down in the past few years. I’ve always wanted to find another way to live on the Earth than the one proposed. Yet the reality of this current time is messy and uncomfortable. I worry about how will all adapt and know that many of us will pay a price for this forced alteration. I keep drawing the Tower card in my Tarot readings. What was built will crumble. But I also keep seeing the Wheel of Fortune. What goes around comes around. We are on this Earth, in this big cycle of life. We will have to build anew what has been destroyed.

In the Fire
So we are in this new place, with this New Moon, all afire in Aries. It’s burning our old truths, a wake up call. Some call it an initiation. It’s a trial by fire. It is full of potential. I feel less and less mired in the darkness of my past. It’s all burning up in the dark. It’s intense. Chiron, the wounded healer, is riding with this New Moon, reminding us of our deepest, oldest wounds. Mars, Jupiter and Pluto are still in Capricorn, and Saturn just passed into Aquarius. Nothing feels light, even the light doesn’t feel light, but a spring wind is starting to blow. The next Full Moon is known as the Wind Moon, the one that comes with the Spring winds, the change of seasons, the melting of the snow. The Equinox fell on the weekend, and we cannot deny the energy that is pushing us forwards, driving us to embrace what is new.

Cosmic Flower Wisdom
I don’t usually focus on a single plant in my cosmic downloads, but this month will be a little different. This month I want to invite you into the story of my meeting with a plant which has strangely followed the cosmic rhythms. I say strangely but it is not strange. Plants are intimately connected to the stars, and flowers are the cosmic expression of a plant. They are star-facing, reflecting the movements and shapes of the spheres. They bring this heavenly, communicative energy down to us, and allow us to glimpse the wisdom of creation that is star born. Gerbert Grohmann writes that the “flower is the cosmic pole of the plant”. Flower Essences are a transmission of a plant’s cosmic wisdom, and working with plants ties us directly to the planets and their rhythms.

From Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis. Clary Sage is called here Horminum hortense

Clary Sage
So it is not so strange, that exactly 6 months ago, at the Aries Full Moon, I brought home a plant. I saved it from the compost and was told what it was. Clary Sage. The smell stayed with me for days. I left it in a white bucket, roots, earth and all, not knowing exactly what I would do with it. I knew it was powerful medicine and it sat in my cool kitchen through the winter. I did start to process the plant for its leaves. I moved the bucket out and started sorting the plant material in a basket, in the absent-minded way that I often do. Then last night, in the throes of Dark Moon angst, when the moon was in Pisces, I thought of a bath, and then realized I had no salts and then realized I did have a lot of this dried herb I had gathered last fall and wouldn’t that be good for the bath. I then realized the synchronicity of the moon timing. Why did this plant call to me exactly six months after I first brought her home, an entire zodiac moon progression later? She was ready to be used. This is not the first time a plant has proven to know of my future necessity, but I’d never experienced directly such magical timing. So, thinking of the depth of my wounds, so awake what with the Sun crossing Chiron, I put the whole basket of dried flowers, stems and all, into the bath, which turned a beautiful green. I sunk in.

Plant Wisdom
What happened when I did so? I began to feel the plant’s wisdom. Clearly and from a distance I began to see all the things that are a part of me that I reject sometimes and don’t want to see. These were no longer scary. She held me in her lap, protecting and comforting me. In my mind’s eye I saw her blue, cup-like flower as a place for me to hide. She enveloped me. She allowed me to see how far I have come.

Plant Synchronicity
There were more synchronicities as I learned about her after the bath. Clary Sage is also known as Clear Eye. She is associated with the Moon and Mercury. I remembered her blue flowers which speak to an association with the throat chakra, which is also the Messenger God’s domain. She is sacred to Diana, being lunar, and to Luna, so it is no surprise that she called to me on the eve of New Moon. She is good for heightening clairvoyance and divination. She helps you see clearly and was revered by the Romans for doing so, hence her Latin name, Salvia Sclarea. Salvia comes from the Latin salvare, to save, and she certainly saved me from the vertigo depths of my own darkness. See? she seems to say. You can take it. You can learn. She brought me the clarity to love all parts of myself. In French she is called Toute-bonne (All-good).

Plant Energy
She also is an aphrodisiac and she brought sensual pleasure to me as well, which was all the more welcome as I’ve been feeling the Venus in Taurus energies that are currently influencing us. I felt my heart beating. In Chinese medicine she is known as being good for Qui - life force energy, and in the hot bath I felt my blood flow again, as if my heart had stopped beating with worry these last few dark days, under the weight of my shadow and the shadows of the past, the shadow of all of humanity. It was as if she jump-started my heart, making me feel loving and lovable again. I was suddenly safe, even within the shadow. A friend testified that she helped with her childbirth and I read of her estrogen like components. She is a friend to the womb, in all of its dark, creative power.

Plant Power
The experience was very strong. I probably didn’t need to use the whole plant, but taking a bath in her green waters was like being in a forest of her growth, in a jungle of her leaves. I added baking soda and she helped me let go, shed the skin of the remnants of old stories I don’t want anymore, of stories I want to leave behind.

Seeing Clearly
Today, writing this, I feel freer of these old stories I wore like clothes, and there is a new layer of snow on the ground. On the land I currently live on there is a pond, frozen and dark, and as I look out, this dark in white, I see a surface, as if made for scrying in. What do I see? Through this darkness a rebirth. Six months ago, at the Aries Full Moon, I wrote about fear too, the poles of fear and confidence, and I can feel these same tensions now, though in more of an external way. We are being asked to reconsider how we relate to others, how we relate to our own fears. It might be a lot to ask, but the plants are here to help us, and we can each, at any time, tap into their learning. Our sources of information are expanding, and this can be exciting. But we do need to take time, go slow, listen to our bodies and listen to the Earth. I’ll be doing it too and would love to do it with you. Please reach out if you want to talk about opening further to plant wisdom. I have a selection of Flower Essences available for your to buy if you want to work with their cosmic wisdom and we can also talk about working on connecting to the plants together to help you through this challenging time. My experience with Clary Sage was just a beautiful reminder that the plants really are just waiting, waiting for us to reach out and ask, waiting to welcome us home again and again, to our new selves, to this new Earth.

Thanks for reading!

Equinox blessings to your inner and outer gardens,

Amy

Marching into March: Feeling and Releasing Fear with the Full Moon in Virgo

The maiden marching into March, in like a lion, out like a lamb. Painting by Briton Riviere, 1890

There is an old saying that says March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and it seems to me there never was a time when we needed this expression more. We all need to be lion-hearted when faced with the reality of the world our society has created. If we tune into the human airwaves, there is fear of illness, fear of lack, fear of difference, and then there is the literal destruction of our natural world and resources growing ever more serious, a train heading for a catastrophic wreck, full speed ahead. Our leaders are not pulling on the emergency breaks. It can feel numbing and heavy. The Pluto/Saturn conjunction was not so long ago, and the darkness of winter is still close, though the days are longer and the is Sun warmer. This Full Moon is opposite Neptune, so my dreams have been vivid and strange, expressing fear, but also confidence in the new birth that will come. Venus was recently conjunct Uranus, so perhaps we are walking on the Earth in new ways in terms of our relationships, our self-love and sensuality. Yet all this newness and change can increase our fear. What to do? Where are we headed? Everything seems scary and uncertain.

Fear

This undercurrent of fear feeds the media, but the solutions that are proposed seem more inspired to feed our fear than allow us to process it and get through it. Stock up, stay home, don’t touch each other.

It seems almost funny to me that at a time when we have never needed community, support and togetherness more, we are being told to lean into the very behaviors that have gotten us to this place of disconnection from the Earth and each other.

What is fear? Wikipedia defines fear as an “emotion induced by perceived danger or threat, which causes physiological changes and ultimately behavioral changes, such as fleeing, hiding, or freezing from perceived traumatic events.”

Courage

What can we do in the face of fear? We can be like a lion, courageous, living big and open hearted. Courage comes from the Latin word cor for heart, in Old French it was corage, meaning the seat of inner life, of lived emotions. What does it mean to be courageous in the face of all this fear? I think it means to experience the emotions that arise within us and live through them. The moon, which pulls on the Earth and on our inner beings, can help us shine a light on those emotions that we are refusing to feel.

I lived with rabbits for a long time, and watching them - as prey animals they were often in the emotion of fear - I learned what it is to embody fear. In the body work I did to face my own repressed fear from physical and emotional childhood trauma, I also learned how I had stored fear in my body, coming to understand how it erupted at times, destroying the carefully built connections around me. I either froze or lashed out in rage. Storing fear in my body instead of allowing myself to live it, to be the fear, was more dangerous than the fear itself. My rabbits taught me how to BE the fear.

Gratitude

I think we can choose to see the hysteria around the coronavirus as a reminder of this. How can I take this fear of death, represented by a virus, an entity that lives by rules of its own that are strange to me, into my own being? A friend wrote that you can BE the coronavirus instead of fighting it, and I like this response. I also like the answer of gratitude. Gratitude takes us out of fear and into the lived experience of the emotion. In my fear I can be grateful for my breath, grateful for my life, grateful for the Earth and the elements around me. I can notice the small details of things, since fear makes me hyper-vigilant and alert.

The Energy of Virgo

The Virgo Full Moon - Virgo is the sign of the maiden, the priestess, the healer - shines a light on this, allowing us to be careful and diligent, aware of ourselves and those around me, aware of the Earth. She gives me an abundance of gratitude for the healing that is all around me. In the Fall, a huge White Pine almost fell on my house, and its lesson was, through the fear of watching it fall, the simple availability of healing that is all around us. Last night I took the last of the salt bath mixtures I had made of its pine needles, and it reminded me of the abundance of healing that I have around me, not in grocery stores and pharmacies, but in the Earth medicine the plants offer me and the human connections that are there to help me on my journey. I spent the day yesterday sorting through my local herbalist friend’s bountiful apothecary of tinctures. I am sure there is someone making medicine for you in your neighborhood, or that a plant is growing not far away just waiting for you to look down and connect to its medicine.

Strategies for Feeling and Releasing Fear

The old and dying trees near my house drew my attention to their own passing, without grief, acknowledging that there is so much change happening now that a new guard needs to move into place to face the profound alterations the Earth is experiencing in her climate, soil and atmosphere. I understand this when I look at my nieces and nephew. They will be doing the work of living and preserving the Earth long after I am gone. I can help them by preserving knowledge, teaching them to love themselves and each other, and sharing with them my lived sense of abundance. And showing them how to live through the emotional states that will inevitably confront them. Some concrete ways of doing this are:

• EFT Tapping

• Sacred Bathing

• Gratitude Practices (Journaling, Ritual, Prayer)

• Body Work

• Singing and Dancing

Every Full Moon is wonderful for shining a light on what we need to release, that which has been completed, that which we are ready to let go of, and I suggest that we take this opportunity to acknowledge, feel, and let go of the fear frenzy around us. You can learn to tap. You can take a bath and let it all go down the drain. You can write down all that you are fearful of followed by all that you are grateful for. You can sing or dance to express your fear and embody it. But be sure to allow yourself to really feel your fear in your body. Where is it located, what does it look like, how can you describe it using all of your senses? If you need any help crafting your own pattern of feeling and releasing fear, I’d love to talk to you about this! Make a free appointment with me here.

Flower Essences also help us face and digest difficult emotions. If you would like some help from the plant world, a wonderful one for this moon cycle from my apothecary is Gorse, which you can buy here. Gorse allows us to be strong in the face of our fears about our lives. She makes us lion-hearted.

For precision and self-expression, two qualities you may want to embody on this Full Moon in Virgo, I’d turn to Self-Heal, and if you need something softer, look to Phlox, who builds community and compassion through play.

I’m sending all of you love and the strength to face and feel your deepest fears. It can be a wild and fun ride along the way!

In the spirit of the Almost Spring,

Amy