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

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.

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

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…

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

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

The Full Moon in Taurus and White Pine: Sensual and Bare

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.

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.

Fire in Water: The Full Moon in Pisces and Emotional Clarity

The wind that started on the last New Moon kept blowing from the South, culminating in the wild wind on the night of the Full Moon, which called to us through the pines on the mountain we climbed and descended, and banged and clanged about our heads in the cabin we slept in. We heard every acorn that dropped, each one pinging off the roof, waking us up and keeping us vigilant to her energies through the night. In the morning some phone lines were down and I felt breathless and full, my ideas overflowing. Here I will spill what I gathered from that light, a dark fire burning in the watery world of emotion. We offered gifts to the mountain and I was gifted clarity. Now the purple asters are blooming and the trees are turning orange and red, beginning their fall turning.

This watery Pisces Full Moon had me feeling deeply emotional, reeling in and out of feeling states. My Sun is in Pisces, so this wasn’t a surprise, and emotions are often high for me at a Full Moon, but this one felt particularly confusing. The Moon was also near Neptune and Lilith, so I also felt extra dreamy, almost overwhelmed with choices and illusion. How do we let our magic flow out into the world? I let myself move through these states, noting them and feeling them down to their core. This is a good practice, to notice an emotion, stop with it and hold it. Where does it come from? What is behind the anger, the sadness, the pain, or the joy, happiness and fulfillment I am feeling? I noticed that I tend to put certain feelings in boxes: my sexual attraction and longing for connection becomes romantic attachment, my sadness becomes poignant nostalgia, my joy becomes fulfilled desires and satisfaction. But when I stop and feel my emotions as energy, they become both less and more. I don’t have to control them or even make them fit into a box. They are there to show me something, to help me pass through something and move forward. They are there to show me what I want and what I don’t want. I don’t need to project them. I practice witnessing them and welcoming them and, when I can, sharing them. Then they are let loose in a way. I let go of the layers of stories I have attributed to them. I am wind-beaten and a little sore, but I am sitting on a mountain with a vantage point, feeling my connection to the Earth, to others and to my own core.

Emotions are the sensing feelers we put out into the world. Like a plant’s flowers, these emotions both pick up and send out energies. When our emotions are clear and balanced, we both draw in what we need – the pollinators who will help us make seed – and protect ourselves from what we don’t want – the other beings who do not have our best intentions in mind. Emotions help us survive, and thus are intrinsically tied to our bodies, our sense of survival and our instincts. I am learning to read what my emotions are telling me, as a human in this world. This takes time, but I am getting better at it. I can more easily observe instead of jump to conclusions, react or cling. I can admit to myself things I have been avoiding, desires I have not acknowledged, yearnings that have sat too long in the dark and are ready to be planted and sprout.

This last cycle has also brought me renewed awareness of friendship and my connection to others. My connections are increasingly central to my exploration of relationship to the flowers, and vice versa. Today I made a Datura essence in a friend’s garden, because she invited me to come meet the plants she has been lovingly tending. This weekend I worked on a farm with other community members and watched how I was triggered, and then soothed, in waves. The weekend before I sang with friends in Quebec and became more aware of how singing is about the vibrational state of “being with”: being with others, being with myself, being with the world. And this Full Moon I was not alone, but with a friend with whom I could share all these little bits of swirling emotions; every little forgotten flower could open up and come out and bathe in the moonlight. Here I am! Even my shame. A Rosa Rugosa plant told me recently: Know your own beauty! And though I struggle with this, my friends help me. I remember Rosa Rugosa’s message in the mornings when I wake up and look at myself in the mirror. I remember when I see a friend looking at me lovingly. May you all be blessed with the awareness of the love beaming at you from the world, from the eyes of a friend or from the late summer blooms who are spying on you.

My energy has now turned towards bringing in what I will need for the next season, preparing myself for the darker days and longer nights that will come. I’m working outside quite a bit, harvesting, harvesting, chopping, chopping, cleaning, cleaning, serving the humans who will eat the fermented foods I am preparing, but also serving the plants. More and more I feel I am on a mission for them, doing their bidding, and so it feels right to help people connect with them. I feel like a plant translator or interpreter. I teach their language. Soon I’ll write a guide to help others open up to our innate capacity to understand and commune with the plant world. In the meantime, let me know if you want to talk about it! I am offering a free exploratory call to talk about your existing relationship to the plant realm and how deepening your connection could help you. I have several coaching programs that will allow you to start to work with them, ultimately building your own practice in order to work with them on your own. I take into account your astrological chart, your current work with or distance from plants, and your personal goals around living a creative life. What do you think they have to say to you?

A Full Moon Request: Take Care of Yourself

What is this Full Moon asking of you?

The full moon last night was as bright as daylight and the deer were out in the fields. What was this moon asking of me? The fullness of it pulled at my heart and I felt relief this morning when it started to wane again. I called her down and went out to gather some herbs: chamomile and yarrow, red clover and dandelion root, small red radishes, what wanted to come to me. I listened. The crickets are singing and the second nest of baby robins has flown.

With this full moon in Aquarius, the mental was under scrutiny and I felt a strange leap in my own maturity. How do we perceive the world and how much of this is a result of our inner tuning? Our vision depends heavily on our inner states. I was reminded yesterday when I was back in Montreal, standing on the same street as a month ago, noticing how everything looked smaller and greener, less grim and overpowering; a city is just a city, and I can choose to see the trees. It’s as if, with the help of the plants, I can see ever more clearly.

I woke up to the thought that the early summer apples that were falling wanted to be made into vinegar to bring me health through the end of this season. The last few weeks of healing from shingles, and then from a cold, were low in energy and I got caught up in feeling like I would never be healthy again. Yet here I am feeling able to write and work.

This moon is asking me to care for myself. Taking care of myself means to go slow, to be patient with my progress and movements. I don’t have to get things right the first time. I may need to start over.

Taking care of myself: what else does this entail?

Taking care of my body. Needing my lymph to flow – self-massage, body oiling, energy yoga, face yoga, warm water, cold water, walking, eating what my body tells me it needs, avoiding what it tells me is not needed or excessive (sugar, alcohol). How do I pay attention to these signals? I become more aware of them as I take the time to breath and tune into my body. I make time for ritual. I light a fire.

Taking care of my speech and language. Taking care of my words as they are in my head and as they come out of my mouth. Avoiding sarcasm, which cuts into my ability to speak my truth. Avoiding all language that speaks against myself and others.

Taking care not to judge. Not judging means not having expectations of how people or things should be. I accept myself and others unconditionally.

Taking care of myself means being tender with myself. If sadness is a signal to be tender with myself, illness is a sign to be tender with the body. Illness is a sign that I need to up the self-care, to be ever more gentle with myself when the world feels harsh. I may need to sleep and rest more.

Taking care of myself means taking care to help others, which makes me feel good about myself. Taking the time to do good deeds, however small, like making coffee for my family when I wake up or cooking something without being asked. Thinking of what another person would want me to do for them instead of just doing what I want to do. Imagining everyone around me fulfilled and happy.

I think the ultimate self-care practice is gratefulness: I am grateful for my genius, that kind friend who spurs my words along and inspires me daily. I am grateful for all I am given, all that I can give. Taking care of myself means taking the time to feel this gratefulness in my spirit, no matter what the world is presenting me with.

I take care of myself by giving myself opportunities to express myself that feel right, with the right people, and not comparing myself to others. This self-expression affords me the chance to participate in reflection: I am mirroring you mirroring me.

As we wind down for the summer, we can watch the greens turn to gold and consider how our self-expression serves us. What do you want to say? I’d love to talk to you about it! Sign up for a free conversation with me on how working with the plants can help you express yourself. I have two longer-term coaching programs to talk to you about, or if you’d like to learn how to make a flower essence, I’d love to teach you how. These late summer days are just calling to distill some of the wisdom of the flowers.

Lots of love,

Amy

Waiting for the Full Moon in Sagittarius: Observing Shadow, Finding Skeleton Woman, Setting her Free

I’m waiting for the Full Moon in Sagittarius, fasting and watching what comes out of my shadow. I’ve been deep in shadow work the last few weeks, watching old narratives play out and dealing with old emotional reactions, feeling at odds in some ways with the waxing moon which often brings me more light and energy, but seeing how she sheds light on all things as she grows. She’s up there conjunct Jupiter, showing me the expansive nature of my gestures to escape myself. Sagittarius is about idealism and travel, going beyond and above, while Jupiter wants to party at home, so the Moon opposite the sun there, square Neptune, can fuel conflict as we are forced to see the ways we try to escape our situations, inevitably getting pulled back down to where we came from. Mercury and Mars on the North Node are opposite Saturn and Pluto on the South Node, and that feels like a real showdown, dark and fiery, my past versus my future versus my trajectory in this life. I haven’t been feeling very comfortable, have you? I haven’t felt very empowered to change any emotional patterns either, I’ve been feeling sort of stuck, but maybe this is because I am in the midst of adapting to intense exterior change, and because all the waxing moon is really meant to do is reveal and show. Almost a month ago I officially left Switzerland where I’ve lived since 2003. Fifteen years of identities are falling away and I’m not sure who I am. This is what I see:

• A woman with a PhD who feels like a child most of the time. I just moved back in with my parents, and while I was transitioning the last two years, moving back to the US from Switzerland, this seemed like a good idea. Now that I am no longer transitioning, the reality of how it makes me feel is sobering. Sometimes I wish I were miles away again. Yet I’m here because I followed the stream, went with the flow of life, took the path of least resistance, and this is important to me. I believe that this is where I am supposed to be. All my striving to always be somewhere else, be someone else, had to end. I’ve always been running away from myself. I’m not sure what to do with what I see, however. It’s a discovery. 

• A woman starting a business who doesn’t feel valid and compares herself to others. There is the feeling of being a fraud, which follows me around no matter how experienced I get or how many degrees I have. What makes me deserve to be in this position? Why should I strive to be independent when the rest of the world is not in the flow at all but running in the rat race? Because it is vitally important, for the world at large and the particular animals and plants that we stop running. And that is what I am doing. I want to stop running. This does engage some risk, however. If I stop running, where will I be, who will I be? It’s a discovery.

• A daughter who wants to help her family and community and save the world. Of course all of this running couldn’t be stopped if I didn’t have a place to stop, and I am very grateful that I do have a kind of pause setting to be on for a little while, while I build my business and settle. But there is a kind of vulnerability in doing what I am doing that I am not used to. I have been embracing my vulnerability in the last few years, seeing strength in it, but it still feels strange to be here and to not really know what I am doing or where I am going, a big step forward into humility, and my critical mind often won’t let me be. How does one belong to community? How do I help my family in a way that feels regenerative to me? How do I stay when I have never stayed? How do I stay free of despair in the face of all that is dying around me in order to take the ethical action needed to change the world? It’s a discovery.

Maybe the eyes of the flowers have taught me to see myself more clearly. It’s as if I can see myself devoid of color. I’m a kind of outline. The material is fading. I suppose I’m getting back to some more essential core of me, but what if nothing is there once I get to it? That is fear. Stories teach me to embrace it.

I am reminded of the Inuit story of Skeleton Woman that Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote down in her book Woman Who Run with Wolves. Skeleton woman drags along clanking behind us until we embrace her and bring her home. So I’ve been hunting and running and finally, back home, I have to cry on myself and take out my heart and hear it beat and sing myself whole again. It’s a long journey. Sometime, I don’t know when, I wrote a poem about it:

I’m smilling at Lady Skeleton.
Underneath the skin
of our perfect bodies,
there is fear.
But why? It is only bones,
only that fragile stuff we are made of
only what is necessary, intrinsic, true,
the other side of beauty and of joy
this dark mother that will pull us to her breast.

I would like to look at you
and say we are the same
and pull you to me too
and forgive this mighty love
for that pain which, because we are human
and small, must drip from its bones
or grow from its head like hair.

I would like to go to you
and embrace this darkness too,
this freezing that must come
for there to be a thaw.
I’m smiling at Lady Skeleton.

Maybe the light of the moon is so bright it is like an x-ray, teaching me to see through me to the skeleton within so that I can smile at myself again, make her whole again. I know she wants me to be free.

Nobody else has the plot line for our lives; it is up to us to make it.

Do you want to work on uncovering your shadow and singing or writing or drawing yourself back whole again with the help of the plants? I’d love to hold your hand as we discover what it is we are all about. You can sign up for a free exploratory call with me here. I’d love to talk to you about connecting with the flowers too. Are you curious about how they might help you see yourself more clearly? Have a look at which ones call to you here. My shop is up and running and I can take payments with Paypal and credit cards! This feels like a miracle. If you are not subscribed, sign up to get my blog and special gifts and offers here - coming up soon, a free guide to plant communication!

I hope the moonlight helps you grow all you want to grow and release all you want to let go.

Lots of green and growing love,

Amy

This Land Is Not For Sale: Full Moon Eclipse in Leo

A lion on the horizon, a new self to shine in. This land is not for sale.

Lions in the Masai Mara

The sudden yellow feathers of weaver-birds reminding me of my resilience. I’m building a nest to live in. This land is not for sale.

Warm tortoises moving slowly in the sun, eating hibiscus blossoms. The quiet and growth of owning my privilege, of learning to be grateful, of doing more. This land is not for sale.

Shedding Skin and Selves

I’m almost at the end of my trip to Kenya. I will have spent almost a complete moon cycle here, a little more than one waning moon period, shedding skin and selves. Before coming I had reservations, about participating in what seems sometimes like exploitative tourism or expat living, the trash and development that goes along with it, the travel I no longer want to do by plane, but the land and people here have opened my heart in a way that I think makes it all worth it, and the people and the land here need the money and the visibility of something other then terrorism, something else than exploitation. So I’ll give voice to that, and do something about it. This is right in line with the eclipse – a surprising opening to love that changes one’s perspective and ones actions, from dark to light.

Taking Time To Process and Distill

It feels hard to summarize what I have discovered here and it may take some time to process and distill what I have learned. I made two essences, one, Hibiscus, about faith, in perfect time to counter what has been a continuous flow of bad news, pointing to death and stagnation. The second, a native Sandalwood, made in beautiful bush-land in Kajiado county at the home of dear lifelong friends’ of my parents (now mine), gave me an abundant message. She is appropriately good for transitions, crossing boundaries, moving to new and unknown realms:

This golden skin I’m in, translucent.
It’s very easy for me to detach.
I’m floating above the ground.
There is no ground, I’m floating,
the material world is abstract,
the spiritual is grounding,
what is ephemeral, solid.
It’s easy for me to detach.
I am peaceful in the midst of material difficulty and strife. I rise above, becoming more than my body.
It’s easy for me to detach.
I am sound and senses.
This golden skin I’m in, translucent.

The Intellectual Details

Funny, I think the flower’s message does indeed summarize my trip here, minus the intellectual details:

At an expat party, learning that helping women with menstrual health is difficult because many girls simply don’t have underpants in which to put the reusable pads a German gynecologist acquaintance wants to give away.

Clothes almost free in the markets, many of them coming from European charity shops: how Africa must deal with the results of so much inordinate consumption in Western countries, these piles and piles of clothes.

Money, so abundant in some areas here, is non-existent in others, so that prices are hugely variable; in a Masai village, being asked for 100 dollars for a visit, not wanting to pay it so negotiating it way down then buying lots of crafts from them anyways, knowing they will all share in the earnings. Being repulsed by this cultural tourism yet loving the sound and the colors and feelings and smiles that were shared with us anyways (these people still so connected to the land in its vibration).

Learning: cost is relative, we are all in this together, share!

Wonder and Humble Awareness of Exactly Where We Are At

Open, open, open up to the horizon and see as far as you can see so that every detail of the landscape could be an animal. Elephants! It was explained to me that the whites living here are mostly the ones involved in conservation because blacks think there are lots of animals here, and there are. I see them! Roaming families of elephants. Still the land is emptying of other beings as it fills with humans, you can feel it. There is only a few small steps between the feelings of abundance and those of lack. Where do I want to place myself within that? I adopted an orphaned elephant and didn’t mind giving my money to steal a giraffe kiss. I reveled in it and felt her prickly lips on mine for days. I suppose it comes to that: amazement and appreciation, wonder and humble awareness of exactly where we are at as a species on this planet. I interact as much as possible with the non-human. It reassures me.

This Land Is Not For Sale

This land is not for sale: the sign I most often saw on plots of land in Nairobi, to warn people of con-men selling plots that they don’t have any right to. The city is growing at an unimaginable speed, some areas, for as far as you can see, filled with concrete blocks rising up, which means the middle class is rising, but still, lots of girls can’t afford underwear (this thought keeps coming back). All the beds and couches for sale along the busy roads are directly linked to this new housing, and I think of all the trees required to supply furniture for this new middle class. Yet I notice how lush and green and giving the land is. On the road back to Nairobi from Lake Naivasha I notice the new tree plantations of non-indigenous trees in rows. Just as in more northern countries, this can't be good for the land. I think about the struggle of the giraffe; it can’t eat them and wouldn’t be welcomed on the land there. I imagine there used to be elephants everywhere.

Money Is Really Some Strange Kind of Magic

I try to understand salaries and the huge differences between, say, what I make in Switzerland and what a cook is paid in one of the cafés that cater to the affluent in Karen, their daily salary as much as one of the dishes on the menu. I can’t really understand that, other then to take it as confirmation that money is really some strange kind of magic that makes us feel either wealthy or poor, and act accordingly. I know how I want to feel about that.

I went to a girls’ school, Daraja Academy, near Nanyuki, where the girls were so thrilled to be learning; they wouldn’t have been able to go to high school if they hadn’t been chosen to attend. I helped the English teacher with some lesson planning and befriended the girl I shadowed. I loved our exchanges, her hopefulness and dreams, her realism too about her struggles and the struggles to come. Many girls get pregnant early here and have no choices about what they will become. We talked about wanting to change the world and how to do it. I felt understood. I think I’ll go back there to volunteer in the future. I understood why my father spent his life working for schools like that.

The Nest

Yesterday I gave lots of love to some babies at an orphanage, just for a little while. We had gone to pick up my niece from her community service. The place is called ‘The Nest', and if you are in Nairobi, you should go to their baby village and hold the babies there. They really appreciate it, looking up at you with their big eyes and reaching up, up. I think about all the babies, all the ones that don’t survive, all the ones that do, all of them becoming, moving around like us on the planet. My heart opens. I hope yours does too. I think really all we can do is allow for it and see what the consequences are.

The final message of Sandalwood and the Full Moon Eclipse which kept me up last night: I’m thankful for this experience and the ease with which I can be free.

(Originally posted January 21st, 2019)

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)