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

Two Deer in the Dark: A Full Moon Eclipse in Cancer and the Saturn Pluto Conjunction

My body has felt heavy for days. I can’t blame it on the holidays, which I had trouble getting through, physically: a bad cold, a sprained wrist. I couldn’t DO. I could just be, and watch those around me, and sleep, and drink liquids. I couldn’t lift. I had to be careful with the wood I needed to move to feed the fire. I had to do things with my right hand. I couldn’t write. My body was heavy for days. It reminded me of periods of grief I’ve lived through, but I wasn’t grieving, I was sinking and slowing. Who was I? What was it? Something was changing.

Then the Full Moon came last Friday and I started to see. Veils were lifted and I was exposed. Fires were burning, animals were dying. Here it kept snowing, and I wrote even though it hurt. I wrote poems, about the fires, and the deer I saw in the dark, and the fire I tended here. What was far felt near. I took a bath and scrubbed away all that I know needed scrubbing away. And it feels like what was personal last Full Moon - the dropping of identities I no longer need - was true for humanity. The appearance of what we are - selfish capitalists bent from greed destroying the planet for things we don’t even need - drops away to reveal something sweeter. We help each other. And now when I read about the fires in Australia, that is what I see, stories of people helping animals and each other survive in this situation we’ve created. It doesn’t make it better, but it makes it easier to move forward and to change. The Full Moon in Cancer, eclipsed, made me feel mothered and mothering in the dark. I felt immense sadness, but also deep compassion.

The weight of the darkness and also the embrace of it represent the Saturn Pluto conjunction to me. It is heavy. Saturn makes us feel the weight of time and death and Pluto demands that we become intimate with it. But like a veil, or a thick dark shell, maybe we are breaking out of ourselves and the darkness we have carried all these years. The last such conjunction was in 1982, and on the day of the conjunction, as I meditated with it, I literally felt drop away from me a childhood trauma that has haunted me since I started to be able to see it.. Maybe the fires and destruction we are witnessing are like this too. We have started to see the harm we are doing to the Earth, and the burning is killing, but it is also perhaps the first steps to break free from the destructive habits of consumerism, to break free from wasting energy, to break free from burning our one little blue planet, so precious and alive in the dark. In a way we are breaking through. I like this image anyways, as if humanity, shining as it truly does, is encased in a hard, black shell, and all we have to do is push our way through to become who we truly are.

My hearth fire continues to occupy me. In addition to being relatively immobile, I was also out of wood. This Friday though two neighbors came to help me take down a dead Hophornbeam tree from the woods behind my house. I did not know this tree, but it was carefully chosen by my friend because it was more than ready, and I think it had reached out to him. It had probably been dead for five years he said and it was waiting for its next life in the fire. It warmed me twice, or five times over as I dragged the logs through the snow and down and back again, following deer trails.

I am getting to know this tree now that its wood is warming me. I lugged it over snow in a sled to my wood shed while my hardier neighbors, in full use of their wrists, split it for me. Since warming myself almost exclusively with wood from the land around me this winter, I am endlessly amazed at the abundance the trees give to me, especially since the White Pine fell behind my house and supplied me with an endless amount of needles for tea. And here was this second gift of wood, gift of body. My wish for 2020 is to be always aware of this abundance around me. The quantity of nourishment the animal gives. They way I ate that venison stew for days, made from a two pound gift of a hunter friend who shot it in the ravine behind my house. The way the Christmas ham lasted weeks and we just finished the post-Christmas turkey. It’s unbelievable really. And yet we are fed this story of scarcity which makes us box and package it all and feel poor. Well, I dream of another life for me and the trees. We dream of it together as the Hophornbeam, also called Ironwood or locally, Hardhack, keeps me warm. It smells sweet and burns long. My nights aren’t cold anymore.

I met two deer in the dark.
One stayed, one ran.
I stopped. I sent out
gratefulness to the first,
I thanked her for being there,
We felt our hearts expand.

The second turned and ran
as I kept walking up
the hill in snow.
The moon was out,
more than a half,
my shadow fell.

The trees creaked.
I caught the white of tail
as the second deer ran,
a flash in the moonlight.
I wonder when
we will connect again.

Here is to what you may meet in the dark and the clarity that comes. I hope you have a fire or a candle to stare into and I hope you dreaming is long and your being as true to you as you can muster. I’m looking to work with some new creatives who want to explore their connection to plants, so if you are called, make an appointment with me here. Would you like a Flower Essence to accompany you through the remaining darker days? You can find a selection here or make an appointment with me to see which one might be right for you now.

Stay well and strong.

Amy

A Full Cabbage Moon in Aries: Vegetables, Fear, and Coming into Confidence

The milkweed is blowing to seed, the calendula still blooming, blooming, reflecting the leaves that are falling, falling, as I write. They reached their red peak on the weekend when we were blessed with sunny, bright days of golden mornings and blue afternoons. I harvested and chopped cabbages, some of them 15 pounds, and as I observed them, held them, felt into their growing and their becoming, I realized the cabbage is a lunar plant. I am fascinated by planetary plant correspondences, and I love feeling into them instead of looking them up. The cabbage is lunar because of its color and shape, and also its growth cycle and fermentation cycle, which swells and responds to the lunar energies. Inside, it looks like a brain, which tells us something about our own dispositions too: how lunar we are with our swellings, mental and emotional, as well as physical. Last night’s abundant Full Moon brought some swelling in my ankle and an awareness of what I need to do to better be able to receive. In many ways, this is the culmination of the New Moon’s energies for me. I like tracking the movement between the two.

This Full Moon brought overwhelm, excitement, self-expression, new beginnings and a certain amount of fear that accompanied it all. I like making an intention to release at every Full Moon, and fear is what I want to release this time around; fear doesn’t do well in Aries. It becomes aggressive and agitated. As the leaves fall, I’m deciding to continue releasing this fear stored in my body. I’ve worked enough on where it comes from, I’ve understood the patterns, I’ve seen its cause and effect, and now it is the time to let it go. I can track it in the body. Where is it today? What is it wanting to say? I’ve been doing a daily EFT tapping routine that helps. Mars, Aries’ main planet, is in Libra, where he doesn’t feel so comfortable either, and this has me aware of my own fear and aggression as it relates to those around me. How can I be with the discomfort of fear and the reactions that it brings while holding respectful space for myself and others?

The Aries-Libra axis in the sky runs between the opposites of personal expression and relational ease. At one end of the spectrum, we are at the extreme of putting our needs first, and at the other we are forgetting ourselves to accommodate the other. At the Full Moon, the Moon, now at the end of Aries, fully reflected the light of the Sun, which is in Libra. Both energies of these poles can be lived in the energy of fear or confidence, which are opposite but also complimentary. Fear in some sense allows me to be confident, while confidence pushes me to accept the things I fear. In relationship, we can fear our mistakes and our imperfections: much of the last few years I’ve explored the experience of rejection. If we fear rejection, we often reject things about ourselves. If we reject ourselves, we often fear the rejection of others, and this can then be reflected in our daily lives. I remember I had a dance teacher once who would say to me as I was dancing, don’t reject yourself. I don’t know how she saw that I was doing it as I danced. Rejecting ourselves can be something we do physically without even realizing we are doing it, so it can be good to sit with and consider the things we might be rejecting in ourselves. These could be positive as well as negative things. We might be rejecting our beauty and grace, not just our awkwardness and mistakes. So I think Libra and Aries can teach us confidence despite our shortcomings and with our gifts, both with ourselves and in relation to others.

It is normal, with the fall, to return to past lessons of loss and to see our lives slip by in a sepia-toned newsreel. Yet our lives, like the planets, are always moving. They are not fixed and relatable in a linear way, but movable reflections of our current perceptions. With the Full Moon, we also moved through a square between the Sun and the Moon and Pluto. This brought me the desire to stand in my own power, and I practiced that, being seen, not refusing my own brightness. These reflections were inspired by Kaypacha’s weekly Pele Report, and my sense of the Full Moon as benevolent and abundant came from a Vedic astrologer I like to follow, Keri Shields of Anandashree Astrology. The light of the Full Moon invited us to connect to the energy of the Goddess Lakshmi, born on this night, from the ocean, like Venus. This benevolent energy can accompany us through the waning moon period, which can often make us feel vulnerable and fearful. Venus is in Scorpio now, a dark place for the goddess of beauty to be, so we can remedy any feelings of inadequacy with reminders of Lakshmi’s abundant generosity. Writing this, I’m reminded of how the Full Moon is, ultimately, a time that heightens the polarities. I realize this whole post has been about moving between extremes. This will also become gentler as we roll through fall to the next New Moon. Thank goodness! The energies of both fear and confidence can be tiring and I find, as I’m writing and getting ready to share, that they are both running strongly through me.

I wonder what else I’ll be moving through, and what you are moving through too. If you would like some help coming into confidence, please make a free exploratory call with me. I made a Daikon essence recently, after weeks of working with the plant as a crop that we are transforming into kim-chi, and I love the lesson of this magical, white, root vegetable. It spoke to me of deep-rooted expression. It would love to help you reach your own depths, stand in your power and speak your truth. I’d love to work with you, your cycles, the cycles of the moon and the planets, and the plants, to help you claim your divine creative expression and be seen, shining like a flower. Please connect if you are feeling like you could use some support as you are coming into your own confidence. The world needs your light at this time.

Daikon Flower

I wish you many golden mornings and blue afternoons, while we slip into the darkness of winter.

Sensuality, Clarity and Transformation: Drinking Chamomile Tea with Pluto and Saturn on the New Moon in Taurus

Last night I dreamt of bulls, red bulls, pulling me into my sensuality, grounding me.

Last night I dreamt I had a hat that I received in the form of a crown; it came floating down to me out of the sky. When I put it on, it magically changed shape, becoming a red felt cloche, a flowered knit beanie, in accordance with how I was feeling. I felt it adapt and shift to the contours of my head. This hat was a marvel; I was a little girl living in a dystopic future, in a house patrolled from within by a security guard with dogs.

Awake to my own desires this Taurus season, the New Moon feels like a reminder to express myself, to put on my best hat, and to let this hat be what it wants to be, without censoring myself, as visible as a red bull in the world. With Pluto and Saturn on the South Node of the Moon (not an object in the sky but an astrological point, this one related to our pasts), both squaring the New Moon, it feels like Saturn is the guard, patrolling my insides, making sure I do what I need to do in order to grow up, while Pluto is the dog, looking for all the forgotten bits of soul I’ve left behind, sniffing them out and calling them home. He bundles them up, makes something beautiful and throws them away. I love it when the planets show up in my dreams. What’s outside is inside. I know I am okay. The past is cleared away. I feel like a new lover to myself.

I have been drinking chamomile tea everyday for two weeks, a plant diet, going deep into what her lesson is for me. What I keep coming back to is clarity: the clarity of her colour which is also the colour of my hair - the clarity of how she allows me to see - the improved clarity of my perception. I realize how clear and bright everyone’s eyes can be, the dream shining back to me my own light, which is everyone’s light, a feeling of wholeness and unity as her golden essence flows through my veins, cleaning my blood. I feel enveloped in a new way of perceiving that is free of judgments, free of my own thinking, in some sense free of me, full of golden tea. She shows me (and I already knew it but we need to be reminded of it) that I am 100% responsible for how I choose to see the world and what I choose to do in it.

I put on my best hat for the day and go out to meet the forces that play with me. They are inconstant, a running stream beneath me. I am not afraid to wade in. I go out with words. I leave a trace, a filament across the sky, my feet on the ground, in the water, my head in the stars. It feels good to be alive.

I’m encouraged by all the positive change I’m seeing in the world. More and more people are connecting to the Earth as a living organism, more and more conversations about plant communication (I’m dreaming of teaching an online course on that!), more and more stores without plastic, more and more countries banning it, more and more - like the inverse of progress - going back to a reciprocal idea of sustainable nourishment and love, and it all starts with ourselves. Pluto is also linked to love and death, two of the greatest forces of transformation. I’ve always been more interested in that for myself than in security or stability, and this explains many of my (sometimes unfortunate) decisions. This interest in transformation can be challenging for human relationship, but it poses no problem with the plants. Maybe that is why I get along with them so well. They are here to help us transform. Sun at my back, warmth in the cold Spring air, I am here to change and to change the world along with me.

If you would like to talk about how I could help you connect to the plants to creatively own your own transformation, you can schedule a free exploratory session with me. I’d love to talk to about how you are feeling your Earth connection in this sensual season and what kind of expression this connection is asking of you.

I made two essences at the New Moon yesterday, Dandelion - my long time ally and supportive friend - and Bleeding Heart who gave me the following lines (we’d been communing about the transformative power of heartbreak over the dark moon week which was quite emotional for me):

My bleeding heart
bleeding all over
onto the ground
healing and feeding the soil
my bleeding heart healing the soul
a white drop from pink
fertile milk of heartbreak
seeding change
and transformation.

And I’ll leave you with that.

You can read more flower essence messages in my shop on this website. A good way to browse: click on the picture of the first image which draws you in when you look at the page. I’m sure the message of the flower will speak right to you, clearly.

I hope you had a wonderful May Day - Beltane- Easter or however you choose to celebrate this season of change. Stay open and loving and I hope to connect with you soon.

Tender and Fierce: Aries Season, My Pointy Green Shoes and a Story for the New Moon

Spring is tender. Spring is fierce.

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Cicely Mary Barker

Walking through the world I’ve been feeling these two contradictory sensations of Spring in the world. But are they so contradictory? To break through something, you need a certain fierceness in your green newness. The buds of leaves I love, in their tender green, must break through harder protective layers with life force. The “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drive the Flower” is not a passive poem. The butterfly’s tender wings must break through the cocoon. It’s violent, and Spring has its violence too. It’s fierce, in like a lion, and tender, out like a lamb. March is my birthday month and I remember birth has its violence too, a radical transition. I came through in breech position, butt first. I feel held by these two forces as I walk the world, fierce and tender always.

I Walked Home In Its Light

The recent planetary line-up has been intense. The Equinox coincided with the Full moon in Libra and I walked home in its light, the flowers in the night still growing towards the light, reaching, ready, not yet open, waiting. Excited! Effervescent. I felt giddy and then angry and frustrated. Aries season. Head first with horns then abruptly blocked, for there is still more to work with, let go of, move around. But with the Equinox there is courage and belief in the new season. I am taking Hibiscus flower essence, red and pink, faith and confidence, a perfect message for now. Pluto on the South Node seems to be squaring everything and I feel like I’m in the depths of deep transformation.

Pointy Green Suede Shoes

Speaking of violence and tenderness, I feel like growing up is often a process of muting our tender love for self, and that this is often learned between girls as they grow. In seventh grade I had a pair of pointy green suede shoes. I really loved these shoes and I felt like they expressed the essence of myself. They were soft and comfortable, they smelled good. I loved wearing them and I loved looking at my feet in them. I must have been doing just that when a girl at school called me out on it. “What are you doing, are you staring at your shoes?!?” and I immediately stopped and felt guilty for having shown that I loved this part of myself, those pointy green elf shoes that I identified with so much. I can remember other instances of this girl on girl criticism, in the ballet school changing room, in the classroom when you had to pretend you weren’t so smart. It was normal and cool to criticize your own body, it was expected to belittle yourself. None of us were ever beautiful enough. It seems so strange to think about now. There is a price to pay for enforced humility. But is this even humility?

Humility, But A True Humility

I went to look at what the stars had to tell me. The therapist I see who works on archetypes and story with me brought to my attention the story of Cassiopeia, the proud queen who thinks herself more beautiful than all other women, a bit like the evil stepmother in Snow White. She is a big W in the sky, easily identifiable, one of the ones I always see, sometimes called the Throne. This Queen is so vain she thinks herself more beautiful than her daughter Andromeda, and she tells the sea god that her beauty outshines that of his Nereid wife. This enrages the god and he punishes her by flooding her kingdom, telling her that the only way to save it is to sacrifice her daughter to a sea monster. She attaches Andromeda to a rock on the coast, but Perseus the Solar Hero rescues her. He then proceeds to punish the Queen, transforming her into stone by showing her a hideous head that he draws out of a bag. She’s silent now, in the sign of Aries. Maybe the lesson she teaches is humility, but a true humility, not one that puts yourself and others down because you have to hide that you secretly want to be the best. Also she’s really scared of aging and death, but all this does is petrify her, literally.

I Told The Story To The New Moon. I Think She Liked It.

Story can help you identify the tyrannical aspects of your shadow so that they release some of their control, and I feel more at peace with this un-self-loving part of myself as I sit in this story. I told the story to the New Moon. I think she liked it.

This is the last post I will be updating here! If you want to keep following me, head over to www.enosburghessences.com and put your name and email in the little box so you can get on my mailing list. I’ll send you my cosmic updates and news of my offerings as they develop. For now, you can schedule a free exploratory meeting with me to discover how we could work together with the plants to open up your creative flow channels or anything else you want to talk about (contact me if the times don’t work, I’ve only put morning hours but I’m still in Europe so this will be a problem for US friends – amy@enosburghessences.com) or you can book an energy healing treatment. Flower essences will be available in my store on there soon.

I hope you are all feeling the motivation to be more truly yourselves, to move forward with the spring, and to appreciate every living green thing!