This morning’s Full Moon in Taurus held beautiful energy, and this evening I finished the article I have been writing for the last few weeks. I got so absorbed in it, in my notes and books, in ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time, that I couldn’t focus on anything else. It was hard to get my ideas out, and hard to share. All of my insecurities came up. I missed my New Moon post, and I can’t even find my notes of what I wanted to share with you. But today I managed finish my that overdue article, right with the Full Moon. Full Moons are about completion, so this felt right, and Mercury was transiting the Sun, giving my ideas words and my words power. Did you bring something to completion? How do you handle those tasks that make you feel most vulnerable and bare?
It is very cold, dark and snowy out, and I’m sitting in my little house tending the fire. This morning I did ritual to honor the Full Moon, with a focus on pleasure, since that is what Taurus likes. While meditating with the Moon, the words sensual and bare came to me, and that fit well. With Scorpio season, things fall away, the trees get bare and I feel I come into the skeleton of myself. I become aware of things I don’t usually see, as if I’m lifting veils. The veils are thin, and I think about death. The leaves have fallen and the trees are naked. The once full forests are transparent. Now the snow is there, a layer, but a clear cover, a layer that reveals. A layer to interpret. Integumentum. I am bare to myself. What veils have lifted on your vision of yourself?
I have remembered these last few weeks that, though I don’t currently work at a university, I am a scholar. I love languages and learning. I love the struggle to find the right words. I love to spend time with books. I love to learn and I love to share learning. I feel a burning to follow this, to persist, as other women in the past have, as my grandmothers and great grandmothers couldn’t. I have been especially aware lately that I am doing it for them. Listening in, I hear them proud of me and I do carry their devotion with me. I do it for them. I’m not sure where it is leading to, and for the moment I don’t get paid for it, but the world needs more heart-centered scholars and I will continue to do it as I can. I think the challenge of it is also something that is positive for me. Though it was a struggle to face the ways that I don’t feel good enough to do that work, it was good to see my struggles clearly these last weeks and to push through, to decide, everyday, this is the work I have to do. This is the work I want to do, though it isn’t as easy as other things I could do. It felt potent, like being in a cauldron. I stirred myself.
So now that we are bare, let us be sensual. The life of the mind can feel so separate from the body, but I think I am also here to bring them back together. The time of that separation is coming to an end. I can be in my mind in an embodied way. I can be embodied and use my mind. Medieval people were more whole and connected, though they talked about the split and in many ways orchestrated it for us down the line. One of the things I love in medieval literature is how, in metaphor, writers combine the body and the mind. Augustine explains how it is that a tongue can be a pen, how many languages can make a single truth that you carry in your heart. I feel inspired by the way medieval people wrote about being human. I want to do that too. We are not body and mind, but whole organisms, universes even, complex and beautiful. So the mind can be sensual and the body can be intellectual, and we can mix it all up, as we do.
My plant work lately has been working with the White Pine that fell behind my house, almost on my house. Each day I drink a tea of the needles and pungent branch ends and meditate on its lessons. I have been doing this for a week so far, and the messages have been about clarity and joy, support and safety. I put pine needles in my bath salts and in vinegar and I will make an oil, and the tree, split, stares at me from behind the house, covered in snow, wanting me to use it, an immense and abundant gift. I will go to stand by it and see, when the snow stops, what else it has to say to me. I will continue this journey with it. White Pine has been on my mind since earlier this year when I learned it was a tree sacred to the Abenaki who have lived longest on this land in Vermont. I wonder at the silence of the woods here, so wild and strange, and used to another type of human. I would like to be more of that type of human that it wants me to be. I will keep listening to see what that could be. Looking for a picture of White Pine, I just found this blog of someone sharing local native people’s land based wisdom. I think that’s another gift from White Pine.
It comes to me that White Pine is sensual and bare, standing there, giving me life. And I realize again what good models our plant friends are, if only we could follow in their stead. How giving they are, and supportive, and protective, and strong. I think, it is enough to learn from them. I feel connected to my ancestors in this way too. I know that my Scottish grandmothers read the land and heard the land and knew the ways to use the plants for health and wisdom. Sometimes I feel that I am only following in their footsteps too. Then I remember that the trees told me they are our ancestors too. So I am following in footsteps of footsteps. This feels good, and I feel less alone, and I can do the work I came here to do, whatever this is in the moment.
As you become bare to yourself, what do you see that you came here to do? Would you like more plant guidance? Book a free exploratory session with me and we can talk about the work we could do and what they might be wanting to say to you. Do you have a book to write or art to make or a song to sing? I am sure you do. I can help you establish the discipline to do it, through ritual and connection to your cycles and those of the Earth. I am taking on new clients for this deep soul work with the plants at this time, so don’t hesitate to ask me about it! I’d love to talk to you. You can schedule a time on my website under creative coaching.
My next projects feel many and varied. I have more writing promises to finish, my Patreon page to update, and a free gift for my patrons and for you coming soon! A Concise Guide to Plant Communication. We can practice while the roots are sleeping under white and the wind is blowing.
Blessings to you on this Beaver Moon and may we not be intimidated by all the work we were called here to do. My love to you.