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

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

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.

Rejection as Success: Shining Ourselves in the Light of the Full Moon in Leo

A lion smelling the good green grass…

Me, the Moon

The Full Moon for me is always a mirror. I get to look at and see clearly where I am and where I have come from. In Leo, she shines particular light on our vibrant selves, who we are in the world, how we want to be seen and how we feel our self-worth. I’m in Edinburgh at the moment, and these past few mornings I’ve been doing yoga in the Scottish sun, feeling like the moon, basking in the reflection. Today I fasted. My dreams have been rich with symbols. This morning, the Lion and the Snail in my dream were two types of people, two ways of being. The one going fast and proud, moving forward, the other feeling pulled back, lethargic, taking the day to dream awake. In myself it can feel like a lot of contradictions to take.

Outside, the Planets

The planets are full of contradictions right now too. Venus is currently conjunct Chiron, the wounded healer, and Black Moon Lilith, the wounded feminine, in Aries, and they are all approaching a conjunction with my natal Venus. It feels like some kind of showdown. My wounds around rejection are coming up. In Aries, my Venus likes to take action, but with all these shadows, she feels stuck. Saturn and Pluto are still communing, though finally separating, which brings a heaviness to everything. We might only be able to see the dark. And Jupiter is there in Capricorn too, making all of our personal gripes epic.

A New Rejection

I missed the last New Moon in Aquarius write up because I was busy with the possibility of a dream that evaporated a few days ago. At the beginning of this cycle I was caught up in newness, stretching my wings away from where I am, dreaming of a new job and external validation, almost tasting the success of this, then this week I found myself abruptly back on the ground with only my own compass to consider. I tasted disappointment again, and what came up for review was every other instance in my life of rejection. We’ve all been there. Not chosen. This is the area of my life that this Full Moon in Leo is asking me to consider.

A Six-year Losing Streak

In more areas of my life than one, I’ve been on a six-year losing streak. This means that since a 2014, I have not experienced, in love or career, that which other people would define as success. I have not gotten jobs I applied for and I have not had the intimate relationships that I have wanted. I had to leave the country I was living in and was literally almost banned from returning for overstaying my time. 2019 was a deep experience of many types of rejection. For the most part I tend to see these things as positives in retrospect and I know how to turn good luck into bad. I claim my choices. And in this same years I did finish my dissertation and I did start a business (neither of which have, as of yet, brought me much recognition or income). I have been hugely satisfied by a few articles I have written and published (for free) and I have cherished my growing intimacy with plants, neither of which I probably would have done if I had experienced more standard markers of success. I have also been blessed with a level of abundance, of food, shelter and love unlike any I have ever known. I love myself more, I am closer to my family, and I never have to worry about how I am going to get my next meal. I was able to buy my first car and I am living in a house with more space to myself than I have ever had. I live near a forest and I am learning the abundance of trees. I work with plants and help people in my community connect to their creativity. So what of my repeated experience of rejection?

My Old Story of Rejection

I have deep childhood wounds around rejection. I moved a lot, I never felt I belonged in my family, I was the youngest and I often felt left out and left behind. I had absent or distracted parents for various reasons. I had a hateful brother. This narrative I know, and many people know. I think I coped with all of this by creating a sense of entitlement around love and achievement that I didn’t question, that surrounded me like a bubble and kept me safe, mostly safe from my own wounds. A lot of my adult life has been involved with looking for exterior validation to keep me protected from these old wounds. In the process, I’ve been disappointed and this has allowed me to uncover them, undoing this false sense of pride that protected me and learning the humbling lesson that nothing is owed to me. The ego comes undone with reality, I see my wounds and I find my path. My soul wanted this. I remember shadow work, and the work I’ve done to embrace the fact that my unconscious wanted to experience these lessons. I’ve gotten used to disappointment. This doesn’t always make it easier in the moment, but you might even say that sometimes I glimpse the way my disappointment is my success.

What is Success?

Which makes me wonder about success. How do we define it? On one level I want to follow my own path to it, yet it seems easier to be a satellite and to be in someone else’s sphere than to shine and step out on my own. I want outside validation. I’m tired of sitting here alone. I know that because of this I have been avoiding stepping fully into my work here on Earth. I’m still looking for the opportunity that would take me away from myself, from my mission, from the experience of my own creativity. Sometimes I don’t really want to take the risk that would put me out there - I’d rather work on someone else’s project. But its ever clearer that the Universe doesn’t want that of me, even in cases where I know I could do it and I would be good at it. The Universe is asking me to be my own sun, to shine in the way I want to, at the center, not orbiting someone else’s star. Not getting the recent job offer I was hoping for actually reoriented me towards living my own dream more fully, standing in my power, shining my light more brightly, and better serving the world in this way.

Singing Our Names

At my singing retreat, we talked about our names. Our names define us externally. Mine have often felt superimposed on the reality of my soul. Yet my name is also what forged me in the material world. It is how I came to be and how I continue to grow. Together we learned it is possible to sing our names, to sing ourselves back into being, to become embodied as the beings full of love that we are, woven into existence through our names and our connections, through the people who named us and the people who call us. Our names are much more than superficial. They are filled with meaning. And even if I am rejected, nothing is stopping me from singing my own name and owning my own presence as a bright light on this Earth.

Rejection is my Success

So maybe rejection is my success. I remember the saying I learned once doing EFT Tapping through one of my romantic disappointments: “Man’s rejection is God’s protection”. Amen. I have been protected. And in the process I’ve learned how valuable growing my self-love is. Flower essences have helped me immensely in this process.

Flower Essences for Dealing With Rejection and Fostering Self-Love

• Wild Rose helps you release the pain of the past, feel present and loved:
  https://www.enosburghessences.com/flower-essences/wildrose

• Gorse gives you the strength to embrace whatever is currently difficult in your incarnation:
  https://www.enosburghessences.com/flower-essences/gorse

• Self-Heal teaches you that you know how to meet your own needs best.
  https://www.enosburghessences.com/flower-essences/self-heal

• Linden, which isn’t up on my website yet, is the essence for self-love. She brings complete self-acceptance and self-compassion to situations in which we feel are not loved or lovable.
  
  Contact me to talk about which essence or combination could be right for you! You can sign up for a Flower Essence consultation on my home page or make a free exploratory appointment with me on my creative coaching web page.
  
  Plants tell us that whatever we are living in this moment is right.

A snail among the flowers…

Finding Inside Outside: Softening into the Magic of the Cold Moon in Gemini

The snow that has been here all month melted in a single day of rain and higher temperatures. When I awoke yesterday I was sad to see that the sparkling landscape had vanished overnight, but I loved seeing the patterns the melted snow revealed, brown and green grass, a carpet of flattened, dried leaves and moss peaking out amidst the stones, still frozen. I feel excited for this Full Moon in Gemini, as though it holds some secret. After an afternoon nap, curled up like a mouse, I went out to see the Moon rise, but the wind told me to go back inside. Now the ground is hard and white again, the wind still vocal, and I’m sitting by the wood stove waiting for that exact moment of fullness.

Full Moons are points of culmination and as I sit here I’m looking back at what this last cycle brought me. Where did all my arrows of desire land? I took action and though I don’t yet have the desired outcomes, I feel full and satisfied with what is. I had a bath and I’m warm inside. The energy of this moon feels all pointed inside, towards my core, which is warm like the fire I am tending.

Finding inside outside. One of the hermetic axioms all good witches know about, as within, so without, can sometimes be harder to experience than one would like. It’s an essential realization though for magical experience and for me it is also essential to feeling connected to the land we live on. Amongst other things, it is the realization that my body is the Earth and the Earth is my body. Without this realization we can’t do magic, because magic relies on the realization that my outer reality is a reflection of my inner state, and we also can’t heal humanity’s detrimental wound of separation with the land and its inhabitants.

I live in a rural place and roadkill is common. I always feel so much pain for the small animals caught by our large and lumbering machines as they try to make their way through the world that has become so unsafe for them. I play the scene of their accident in my mind when I pass their remains on the road, sometimes several times a day if I’m going back and forth on the same roadway, which I usually am. I don’t know if it is the land that holds the memory of it or if I imagine it, but either way it is painful. I wish the world were not so dangerous to the animals that we share it with. Which brings me to the mouse that lives in my house. He likes chocolate and the roasted pumpkin seeds I leave for it in the corner by the stove. I imagine its little mouth eating through the hull and finding the inside, roasted and sweet. Its a clean little mouse so I don’t mind it. I’m sure there are others where he comes from, maybe he is a she or many, but I like sharing with him the abundance here, regifting. For what are our gifts if we aren’t sharing? That’s the message of this season. And maybe I’m healing some of that useless death by feeding a little life that isn’t really doing anyone any harm, not in this old house.

I’m also thinking about gifts because I am offering a poem a day for advent on my Patreon page. I hope these little offerings of word patterns find their way to the people that need them. You can sign up to support me on there for as low as $3 a month and receive all of my daily poetic offerings this month. At advent, each day feels like a gift, and it is. Gemini for me brings variety, but not constancy, which can be challenging. My moon is in Gemini, and I’ve always felt this as detrimental to my capacity to be creative in a focused way, but I think it also brings to my writing, and to my life, the joy of variety. I love learning and exploring, discovering the world. My curiosity makes me a good teacher and my varied emotional life makes me empathetic, though I can sometimes feel spread too thin. Do you have Gemini in your chart? I don’t think Gemini energy is superficial, it is abundant, and this moon shines light on all our gifts as well, teaching us generosity and gratitude. Focusing on these aspects of Gemini can be one way to soften into this Full Moon. Another way is to literally soften on a material level by taking a bath.

A Full Moon Ritual Bath

Water is the moon’s element, so nothing feels more relaxing to me on a Full Moon than taking a full, warm bath, and contemplating where I have come from, particularly in the two weeks since the last New Moon. What were my intentions then and how have they come to fruition? What am I grateful for?

For me a bath is an important moment of self care and showing love to my body, so it is ritualistic in its own right. I like using an herb that has special significance to me and an oil or oils that relate to the energies I am working with. For example this Full Moon I used dried Basil flowers - Basil is sacred to Venus - and Rose Geranium essential oil - ten drops in two tablespoons of coconut oil (you can also use olive oil). Both of these help me feel loved and cherished. I wanted to soften the energies of Saturn, which is currently conjunct Venus, and generally feel like a goddess. You can also use epsom salts and/or baking soda for added purifying benefits. My favorite is a mixture of both.

Take your time and really soak 15-20 minutes in the bath. I take this time to intuitively feel into what it is I would like to release with the next cycle, setting an intention of letting something or some things go. When I let the water out (if you used herbs in the bath, don’t forget a drain catcher!) I like to imagine that everything I no longer need is also running down the drain (I think I got that tip from Rob Brezny!). This visualization is extremely potent at a Full Moon when we are getting ready for the waning time, for the release of what has grown.

Releasing all that is not essential

This Full Moon I set the intention of releasing everything that is not truly me, so that I can become more like my wild twin. This may seem like a tall order, but it is the darkest Full Moon night and the light of the Sun is shining on all of my shadows. That is what the Full Moon does, it shoes us what we need to see but that perhaps we would rather avoid. So it is a good time to see ourselves and identify those aspects that we no longer identify with. What parts of me need to go? I don’t really need to make an inventory though. I just need to know that I am moving closer to myself every day, with every breath, and that I can trust this process. What I no longer need will fall away from me.

Here is a poem I wrote today on approaching what is inside, on finding it outside, the heart of the fire I have been meditating with most mornings:

The heart of the fire
the sunset
I’d wear that color
like a cloak to go
and walk the forests in
to keep me from harm
an orange firelight halo
since dressed as a deer
I’d be mistaken
for the fawn colored
leap into shadow
moonrise clear
I’ll keep this fire
burning in my chest
on my shoulders
until we walk back
into harmony
with the world
at one with the darkness
and give birth to light.

Here is to all the small animals, and the one in you too, your inner fire, your outside in. And now I need to put more logs on the fire. Write soon.

Love,

Amy

A New Moon in Libra: How I Broke Up with My Phone and Learned to Relate to Myself

Holding Calendula instead of my phone. She’s much sweeter!

Lately I feel so strange to myself. My phone broke. I think it was because of a flower. The last picture I took was of a Datura I was communing with in a friend’s garden. And then an update wouldn’t take, and wouldn’t take and wouldn’t take until it wouldn’t turn on at all. So I’ve left it on a chair. I broke up with my phone.

My life without a phone: I miss my astrology application that tells me about the times and placements of alignments and risings and settings of planets and sun. I miss my menstrual cycle tracker. I think that’s about it. What I don’t miss are the hours I wasted staring into a device that doesn’t reflect the world around me or allow me to engage with it. It’s scary to think we are all so used to doing this, to perceiving the world more and more through this interface.

My first smart phone was given to me by a boyfriend in 2012. I felt some resistance, but agreed to engage for a little while. Unfortunately I did not give up the phone at the end of the six month relationship and it has been with me ever since. But I don’t think my phone is compatible with plant communication somehow, so it’s interesting that it has given up the ghost now. What I notice since living without it: My sleep is different, longer or shorter, and more intense. My days are longer and I do more. There are more hours. I engage more with my surroundings. I see more beauty. I talk to more flowers. As I go phoneless, I receive more messages from the universe. It’s that simple. And what do we receive from the Universe? The love that starts us and keeps us going. I never received that from my phone.

This new moon is about receiving love. Venus will soon rise as the evening star and beam down on me. Am I ready to take it all in? I think my phone was getting in the way. My other blocks to receiving love are still there of course but it’s as if I can see them more clearly. Maybe it’s because I’m not staring into a screen to avoid them. I’ve lost my main means of distraction from myself. I wonder at this object, small and shiny, produced as a product to make me into one (conversations at the farm have been about commodification of the self) and as I take a step back from it, I become more myself. The world spins. I make decisions. I may take fewer pictures, but I see more. I don’t have anything to show for myself, but I am more myself without this constant thing to check. It does make it a bit strange to be in the present world, but I suppose no stranger than it is for a flower to be today, or a butterfly. I want to be whole and rooted. I am seeding thankfulness and gratefulness, sun-ward, like them.

I also wanted to write about wholeness – another moon whisper. The cosmic energies are not particularly harmonious at the moment: Venus is square the Moon’s nodes and Saturn who sits on the south one, so there is a karmic tension about endings. Fall has come and we are descending into darkness, moving away from our mothering aspects of self. Perhaps we are being too harsh on ourselves. I’m thinking about relationship and those that brought me into darkness and those that brought me out. I’ve often felt, and been told, that I give too much, but I see now that my giving was seeking to fill a void I sensed, to bring balance, to fill in what was missing there: a too cold heart, an unfeeling mind. My balancing act with others was a beautiful, if sometimes painful, art. I’ve since learned that the only void I can really fill is the one inside myself and that people should do their own void filling for themselves, so I don’t try so hard now. I’m finding my own divinity and learning from this divine within myself. The planets of my birth chart as they move through the sky remind me of the universe moving within myself, all these complex aspects, singing together. Outside as inside, that old saying, the moon reminds us too, balancing the dark and the light.

 What are your new moon intentions? Now is the time to send out what you would like to bring in. The new moon is dark longing, followed by, when she meets the sun, receptivity and becoming, openness to change. I feel the moon slipping down to the void of herself, the void of me. I’m a thin sliver now, dreaming of the dark, not yet anticipating Spring, but reveling in what the roots speak to me. This morning I made an altar and petitioned the planets for a little while. I’d love to help you start a moon centered ritual cycle. Let me know if you think creative coaching with me might help you connect to the universe and write, paint, sing, draw or work on your pet project with the help of the plants! May you listen deeply!

Sensing into Autmn: Venus Retrograde, Full Moon in Taurus and Shadow Work

The leaves are falling, the flowers are sleeping in their seeds, and we are turning inwards again on the wheel of the year. I flew to Geneva again for some seasonal work, leaving behind the golden mountains of home, and jetlag has given me some strange productive hours. There are many things I want to share, for the first time in a while, and I will try to weave them all together here.

Shining Light on Our Darker Places

Yesterday the Sun moved into Scorpio, shining light on our darker places, the obsessions we'd rather not have and the pain we would rather bury sometimes. But I've been there for a while; Venus has been retrograde for a few weeks and she's been bringing me events from the past to survey, times when I didn't feel good enough or loved enough. Tonight, at the Full Moon in Taurus, Venus will cross paths with the sun, forming one of the points of her star shaped movement through the sky and reflecting back to us the beauty of our wounds. I've been working with my shadow for a while now, since she first went retrograde at the beginning of October, and this time around she's brought to me an even deeper compassion for my darker places.

Existential Kink

A gentle place to start exploring the shadow is through the book by Robert Johnson, a Jungian thinker and analyst, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche (1991). He explains what the shadow is in a reassuring way, from the perspective of its Jungian source; we all have one, it's okay, we can represent it for ourselves in concrete ways in the material world and rise above it's tendency to bite us back when we are least expecting it. I didn't begin with a gentle exploration of the shadow though; I jumped right in a few years ago with a practice I learned from Carolyn Elliot, in her course INFLUENCE, which she has coined Existential Kink, EK for short. This practice basically entails allowing your body to find its ecstasy through the fulfillment of desires it usually refuses, in a completely safe way and on its own terms. It's based on the premise that having is a sign of wanting and it turns around our tendency to feel like the victims of our lives. Allowing the body to relax into and enjoy the painful events of the past is liberating in a way that is hard to explain - you have to try it! It's probably best to hear Carolyn herself talk about it:

https://www.dreamfreedombeauty.com/witch-carolyn-elliott-on-shame-the-heroines-story-why-not-to-be-careful-what-you-wish-for-episode-54/

I think she's writing a book about it, so hopefully more people will have access to this powerfully transformative way of dealing with trauma. The practice has felt especially healing for me lately, so this Venus retrograde in Scorpio period that I was apprehensive about has actually been extremely liberating. I feel more free and accepting of the past then I ever have before, which is helping me be less troubled by the troubling events of our present, if that makes sense. There is a breath in, a breath out, and a real reaping of my introspective work, which has often been heavy and daunting, lasting for days if not for months sometimes. Phew. Shadow work pays off.

Not Blindly Giving Our Power Away

On the plane over I read another Robert Johnson book, Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (2008). This short book was also very healing, and I learned again the importance of recognizing when we are putting our gold into someone else's lap, and the need to be conscious about drawing our soul light back, standing in our own light when we can, and not blindly giving our power away because we don't want to or are unable to hold it. In the sky, in the dark, I held my light in my lap and cried, one step closer to accepting myself and my life's learning journey. I wrote this poem a few months ago, but it expresses this current calling back to myself of my desires:

So I'm calling all my desires back to myself,
Every one wanted and then refused.
Every cell, blood red, that went out to gather
Vampire-like, ill-used, I call back to myself.
Every body touched and hurt
in darkness, every sun that shown
on my desired one, every wish fulfilled or spurned
every one, I call back to myself, as one.

I think it's a spell. I suppose I cast it back then, and now, here I am living it. I'm grateful, a step closer to feeling my wholeness, which I sometimes forget is there.

Embodied Earthiness

The sensuousness of these experiences are brought to you thanks to this Full Moon in Taurus, where she shines ample and worthy, embodied earthiness. See if you can feel into any of the discomfort she might illuminate. It might appear in the form of frustration, anger or animosity towards yourself or others. She is conjunct Uranus at the moment too, so our feelings may feel especially electric, new, or charged. As you sound them, see if you can use this energy to shine a light in the darkness and bring a playfulness to your story, however challenging it may be.

Lunar Wisdom

Enjoy her healing light tonight! Some lunar wisdom I've enjoyed reading that moves in the same direction as this and might bring you even more healing introspection are:

Sabrina Monarch, at Monarch Astrology
Mystic Mama, at http://www.mysticmamma.com/astrology-full-moon-in-taurus-october-24th-2018/
and Anandashree Astrology, for a soothing Vedic take https://www.anandastrology.com/blog/full-moon-soak-it-up-ashwini-vedic-astrology

If you want more of my writing on the shadow journey, as Persephone's choice, read https://badwitch.es/heroines-journey-persephones-choice-embracing-shadow-rewriting-myth/

A prose piece of mine, “Origins", which is largely the product of my own work with shadow and myth, was just published in Dark Mountain: Issue 14, TERRA, https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-14-terra/

I'll be writing more as the flowers are sleeping! I'm looking forward to sharing. Keep connecting! Our sparks in the dark.

(Originally published October 24th, 2018)