Activate Your Desires: A New Moon Party in Aquarius

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

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

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

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

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

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

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

So speak to your desires.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,

Amy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,

Amy

My wild garden

Zero Gravity: Lessons for the New Moon and Mercury Retrograde in Pisces

A New Moon in Pisces with Mercury retrograde in that sign, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so slowed down. I’m swimming in the unconscious and sleeping a lot, embracing my darkness, taking a trip on the self-love underground. I’m listening to the water drip and the clocks tick. Something is coming but it is still incubating. I’m watching for its slow emergence.

I’m taking care of four cats and a dog, noticing how animals are naturally slow. Cats sit and stare, becoming agitated when they think a meal is coming. The dog rests until it is time to come rouse me and go for a walk. I like letting their rhythms rule mine for the weekend. I’ve put my agenda on hold.

In the house I’m taking care of, there is a zero gravity setting on the bed I am sleeping in. I’ve been putting myself there to write down dreams, to rest. It feels so relaxing, and very Piscean!

A new moon is a new beginning. I’m planting the seed of myself, deep down under the Earth. My sun is in Pisces, so I’m already naturally in these slow, deep waters, but this moon feels epically so. I’m tracking my dreams, both those that come when I’m sleeping and those I make with my eyes open. I practice, like the cats, keeping my eyes half closed, to see the space in between the sleeping and the waking, the way reality comes together like two eye-lids, half closed.

Animal Emotions

Animals are naturally emotive in an uncomplicated way so spending time with them can help us be too. One cat likes to sit on my gloves on the table. Another sits on my chest while I knit. Another curls up in a box to hide while another one wants to play. All of them are in and out of emotional states rapidly and gracefully. They hiss, then cuddle. I blink my eyes at them.

Emotional Awareness

This season is asking us to become more aware of our emotions, and more patient with them as well. Mercury retrograde can make us feel stuck with them, but I’ve noticed that as I breath, listen to music, talk a walk, they flow. Maybe the flow is a bit slow, it’s still icy out there, but they do flow. Like icicles gathering then disappearing. Sometimes they are like reverse icicles growing up from the ground, coming from some deep space I don’t even know, reaching for the light, bringing me back to situations I thought I’d already said goodbye to, but in the dark they appear again so that I can let them go.

Dream Work

Neptune is also in Pisces, so I’d like to take a moment to talk about dream work. I’ve learned so much by simply writing down my dreams every morning. If I don’t remember them, I write down that I don’t remember them. The dreams get clearer with this practice, though there are still times when they are cloudy. When I write them down and talk about them with friends, I can get perspective on my life. I can take symbolic action on them. This is a way of showing myself that I am listening to myself. Synchronicities start to arise. I know which paths to follow, instinctively. My intuition gets stronger. Tracking dreams is a way to commit to a fruitful dialogue with yourself. It doesn’t always have to be profound. Taking action on a dream can be calling up a friend, buying a book, eating a certain meal.

As a Pisces, sometimes my dreams seem more real than reality, so I can go deep with them. I can dream in a dream. I can dream in a dream when I’m awake too. Right now the Piscean waters are so deep that I can get perspective. I can be miles below myself or miles above. I like playing with these distances. They are not getting me anywhere, but I know that such explorations will help me feel more here, in the moment, in my dream time actuality. Zero gravity.

Zero Gravity

What are the ways we can be zero gravity with ourselves? We can go there with our bodies by feeling how supported we are in our environment, even if we don’t have a zero gravity bed. Any moment has zero gravity potential. I’m resting into the way things are. I feel safe and held.

Datura

I did a flower essence attunement today, with an essence I made in the Fall, a beautiful, dark and strong flower spirit, Datura. When I made her she communicated with me her rage at not being seen. I felt immediate recognition of this feeling in myself. What are the parts of yourself that feel this rage at not being recognized or acknowledged?

Today her message was more gentle, but still had to do with finding constructive expression for this rage. I remembered all the ways my purest essence was silenced as a child, and all the ways I silenced myself.

A white trumpet at the top of my spine
a back bend in time
reaching back to meet myself
I am whole unto myself
a circle in time
I have clarity in all situations
clarity of vision
I see myself as I truly am
unabashed, unashamed
I own my experiences
I come back to myself,
again, again, again.

What a beautiful message to be gifted on this New Moon.

Let me know if you would like this essence, part of a line of shadow work essences I am developing. They aren’t up in my shop yet, so just drop me a line.

If you would like to explore working with me to learn how to connect to plants, get your own messages from the flowers and improve your relationship with your truest self, make a free appointment with me here.

Love and blessings unfolding in deep waters,

Amy

March New Moon and Mercury Retrograde in Pisces: Back Pain, A Bad Tooth and 8 Piscean Self-Care Practices

Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

My neck and back have been hurting for days and I have been working on my past. The backs of our bodies: this is where we carry our past so it can be useful, if there is pain there, to look at the memories or weight from that past that you are carrying. It can be heavy and I like to use EFT tapping to release it. This time I realize I am still carrying, among other things, an old story of childhood pain which has resulted in a very basic feeling of not liking myself. I purge it again. I know this is a very common human feeling so I wanted to address it here. I wonder how we learn it.

How Did We Get Here?

From the point of view of a river or a plant, it is completely ridiculous to not like yourself. For animals, it also makes no sense; it is counter-intuitive to survival. How could a deer not like itself? It's in the moment, being a deer. A dog could perhaps appear to not like itself, but I think they just learn it from us. We are animals: how did we lose touch with our survival instinct and come to hate ourselves? There are probably many books on this, and I've probably read and forgotten some of them, but I would like to know, how did we make a world in which we are so sick with dislike for ourselves that we are destroying the very planet we live on? How did we get here?

Self-Hate As A Coping Mechanism

A coping mechanism. A kind of protection. When you are small, you cannot control your surroundings and many of our surroundings are not conducive to supporting the life of something small. When I was born, I had three siblings and two parents, all of whom were more or less going about their life. I was an element within, an object of this family scenario. I was not born ready to step off and lean into my life once I had learned safely how to walk. I was picked up, put down, and since our rhythms as a society are off, often the rhythms we impose on children are off. I remember it feeling awful. So we are born but some of us, upon arrival, don't want to be here, which turns into not wanting to be alive which of course then we have to repress because you are not supposed to be alive and not want to be alive, so maybe the self-hate is a kind of coping mechanism, a form of self-protection in this world that we only half want to be in. Maybe we can't bear this feeling of not really wanting to be alive unless we justify it by hating ourselves. I wish we acted more like our animal selves.

It Is Time To Dig Down Into It

I think my back pain might actually be an infection in an old root canal I need to see to. The story of that tooth: once almost twenty years ago I got a cavity and I consulted a dentist I didn't know very well who filled it with a composite filling. A few years later, when I was in a diner, I bit into a piece of plastic in my coleslaw and the composite filling fell out and I had to get a root canal. I guess these things happen, but I think the cavity was probably too big to have been filled with composite. Anyways, bad dentist or not, the root canal itself was a terrible experience. I asked for a gold crown to be placed on top of it, to make it a little less terrible and have some gold in my mouth. This tooth has been bothering me for a while but I haven't paid attention to it and so the alive-dead tooth may be harboring an infection. I think this may be causing my neck to be stiff, which is a lot like how my alive-dead being in the world doesn't allow me to move about in my life easily. So it is time to dig down into it, or perhaps remove the tooth. My bad tooth is a good symbol for the parts of my past that are heavy and I need to let go of. Or it's like my self-loathing. I thought I needed a gold crown to be worth something.

I Go Back To The Stars And Think

How can one remove the tooth of ones' dislike for oneself? I'm not sure the metaphor works. I go back to the stars and think, this is just a time of falling away. This new moon in Pisces introduced us to the end of times as we float along in a haze. Well, it made me disoriented anyways, but maybe because I'm a Pisces and a Neptunian-Uranian, a Lemurian and a Pleiadian (look those last two up for some very strange youtube transmissions that always resonate with me). I'm actually not sure where I'm from but you can probably be glad you are not as confused about it as I am. It's not even the new moon anymore and I'm a week late with my new moon blog. Well, I've been dealing with this back pain, and other things. For one, Mercury just went retrograde in Pisces and Mercury is really confused in Pisces. He wanders around and just wants to lie down, a bit like I've been doing, staring at the stars and talking to plants.

Don’t Reject Yourself

Self-rejection. I once had a dance teacher who would say, as we danced, don't reject yourself. I couldn't even tell you how she knew I was doing it. It must have been in my movements. I always felt like she was reading some secret part of me that not even I could see. But as soon as she said it, I knew it was true, I was rejecting myself. Sometimes now I catch myself and tell myself not to do it.

Self-Care For People Who Don’t Really Like Themselves

So here are my 8 suggested self-care practices, especially good for the current astrological climate, from the heart of a true piscean, for people who, half the time, don't really like themselves:

1. Feel the comfort and support which is continually offered to your body by gravity. Feel how your back rests on the bed. Feel how your feet are held by the ground.

2. Take a bath. Take baths. Bless the water as it blesses you. If you feel bad about using too much water, think of the water you are blessing going back out into the world to bring transformation and healing. When you let the water out, stay in the bath and imagine you are letting go of whatever you want to let go of. Feel how nice and heavy with gravity you are afterwards.

3. Go slow. Walk slow. Eat slow. Move as little as you want to.

4. Go see your counselors, healers, therapists, doctors and dentists. You may need some help learning how to like yourself. With any luck, the person you go see may like him or herself a bit more than you like you. This will help you learn how to do it.

5. Don't send that message. You know the one. There have been two of them for me in the last 24 hours. Block the person or just sit tight with your opinions until you feel less reactive about the offenses that have been done to you, now and in the past. Other people often don't help you like yourself (unless they are one of the helpers listed in #4, but even then), especially when you lash out at them.

6. Actually, spend as little amount of time in front of screens as possible. This will also allow you to avoid having to deal with #5.

7. Make a list of your desires. Make a list of your fears. Notice how, most of the time, they cancel each other out. Contemplate that for a while. Take the time to write it all out.

8. Talk a walk, preferably near water. This will help you feel peaceful and composed even though you would rather be a fish swimming in the depths, waiting for spring. Content yourself with imagining that you are a fish.

Also Waiting For Spring

I think we are all a bit like fish at this time anyways, so the last one shouldn't be so hard. This means I'll have extra company as I go about my pre and post birthday days, in various moods, also waiting for spring.

I'm taking Hibiscus flower essence, for Faith (everything is going just as it should) and Sandalwood, for Grounded Spirituality, and Self-Heal, for my stiff neck and for Mercury retrograde. I'm also taking lots of vitamins and using these amazing new plant message oracle cards that I love. Remember, the plants only know how to love themselves, because doing anything else is just insanity.

Take care my fellow fish! I hope you find your joy in this sometimes disorienting sea.

Much love,

Amy

(Originally posted March 11, 2019