The Virgo New Moon: The Fungus In My Nails and Giving In to the Details

The Virgo New Moon

Early tomorrow morning, the moon wanes to darkness in Virgo. Here, summer blusters out in a rain storm and I am getting ready to return to the classroom.

Virgo asks us to get real. Are my toes aligned? Do my fingers add up? All the small details of life can feel difficult and disorderly unless we let them fall into place and align.

I haven’t written a cosmic blog post in almost a year! It’s the rain storm that stopped me from rushing home. I got a too-sweet milky tea and a lemon bar in the cafe down the street and I’m sitting in my Flower Essence studio waiting it out, after a day of in-service, meetings and various levels of fear, collaboration, anxiety, sharing and planning.

New Moon Intentions & Messages

Yes, I do have a Flower Essence studio now! Did I last November? I think I was just moving in. I now have a place to see people in person for a Flower Essence consultation, if they are in northern Vermont, and a place to go to write and sit and just be. I don’t come as often as I would like, but a good New Moon intention for me would be to come more often, and to write.

The lesson of this New Moon came to me as I was walking through the door of the building that my studio is in:

“Feel into the way things are, not the way you want them to be”.

Just as the pesky details of life can feel like too much to handle at times, sometimes these very same details can remind us of the contours of a reality that we may be struggling against or denying.

Listening to the Details

As my lack of blog updates suggests, becoming a high school teacher has been filled with many, many pesky details that I never quite feel able to control or manage. My lesson plans, the kids in my class, their needs, my needs. Then there was my wedding: the planning, the people, the flowers, the venues, the vendors, the invites. I never thought I’d do either thing, teach in high school or plan a wedding, but I guess this is where the details wanted me to be.

All last year I was struggling to catch up with myself. Then Summer came and I breathed out. Now, before I begin again, I need to consider what I learned from last year. I am going to ask my students the same thing. We could all journal on it for the New Moon. What did we learn from where we have been?

Fingernail Fungus

My nails clue me in. For about a year I have had what I thought were nail problems on my hands due to gardening. My nails were always dirty and a bit smelly and strange. I tried cleaning them. I got nifty manicures that my teenage students gave me compliments on. This may not have been a good thing, since the last time I went, just to remove a gel manicure I didn’t want anymore, the manicurist, a beautiful woman from Kazakhstan, told me that I have nail fungus, in all my nails! And apparently you can catch it from nail salons. She’d never seen it so bad. How embarrassing. I was shocked and dismayed, but also relieved to finally have a diagnosis. I must have been exposed to it somehow, I think probably in the shared gloves I wore when I worked on the farm a few years ago.

Wedding Bands, a little bird and Fingernail Fungus!

My manicurist was not optimistic. The treatment will be long she said. It might never go away. I’ve been soaking with Epsom salts and apple cider vinegar, applying tea tree and oregano essential oils, diluted in oil of course, and putting my finger tips in lemons, following the advice she gave me, and waiting to see what happens.

I also got curious.

I’ve always been rather vain about my hands, fingers and nails. They taper elegantly and my nails were always short but strong. I liked them. I remember feeling so dismayed when they started to look strange. But I ignored it. Maybe it was just age? I should have paid attention to the details.

Since my diagnosis, I have been looking for the meaning of this particular ailment. Apparently it is pretty common. I like to use Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life book for the metaphysical meaning of symptoms.

For her, what do the fingers symbolize? The details of life. The hands, grasping, holding things. Fungus represents stagnating beliefs and a refusal to release the past, letting the past rule today. The nails represent protection. Putting all of this together, my ugly nails teach me a lesson. With all the changes in my life, I have struggled to release what I no longer need (funnily enough, I will have a yard sale this weekend, the third one this summer, so I can still keep practicing that one). In the past, fear ruled my life, but it no longer needs to. I can work with some new beliefs, which I know from experience will help my fingernails heal when used in conjunction with the physical treatments I am working with.

I am safe. I can protect myself. I am protected.

I take care of the details of my life without worrying and comparing, wondering and stressing. The devil is only in the details if I allow him to sit there and grin at me.

I see that wanting things to be different than they are causes me more worry and stress. Instead, I can step into my current reality like a new dress. The Moon helps.

The Desire for Perfection

When I think of Virgo, I also think of the desire for perfection. Virgo is an Earth sign, and she wants things completed and whole. I have always struggled with wanting things to be perfect. I never feel I can attain perfection, in anything I do. I remember, as a child in school in Switzerland, a country of perfection if ever there was one, when a teacher asked me to draw the other side of a photographed face. My side came nowhere near reflecting the original. I also feel that I can never reproduce something I have done in exactly the same way. I am messy and my life never looks like perfection, even on the channels that are supposed to manufacture it. What if my desire for perfection was already satisfied? The Virgin is whole and perfect because she is the way she is. She doesn’t have to do anything.

Enjoy this precise Virgo energy, your harvests and the beginning of fall!

Are you interested in tuning into the natural cycles and the plant spirits to tend to your life’s details? You can book an exploratory call with me or schedule a flower essence consultation by booking on my website or reaching out to me.

I’ll write again soon!

Have a beautiful New Moon!

Amy

The Fire Inside: A Full Moon in Virgo

While living with a wood stove, I have learned so much about fire: how it burns and revives, dies and returns, burns slowly and steadily or roars and devours. The other night I dappened down the fire down so much that when I opened the stove in the morning, a puff of smoke escaped and the blackened wood gasped for air before roaring back to life after a whole night of waitings. This describes how I have felt this past week, as if my own energy were just waiting to be released, and the fire behind my projects rekindled. Poof! Smoke out, smoke in, a sudden burning, a warming of the surroundings and, I am awake! I saw the shadow of smoke on the snow. For now the fire burns inside.

I need to ground the flame. My dreams around this Full Moon have been intense and restless. I dreamed I was wearing a yellow apron. I dreamed I was back in school, learning. I dreamed I was teaching, which I'll go back to in real life this week. The night of the Full Moon, she woke us up when she was exact. The following day I drew the Hermit card. In Tarot, the Hermit card represents Virgo, and this noble Virgin said to me:

Look inside for the fire inside. Outer reaching only gets us so far.

This is a lesson from the plants too. The heart of growth lies deep within the seed. A reminder not to take too much in. All I need are a little light and air to blaze again.

In a session with a client recently Sunflower came to me. She offered me a golden oil which she poured down my throat, soothing and reviving me.

A Gift from the Flowers

Sometimes our fire inside can feel terrifying, obsessive and dark. Our addictions may come to light, those things that we burn for that do not do us any favors. Our desires may sometimes feel taboo. But your fire inside need not scare. Our passionate desires can light up the dark and burn away shadows, even the ones we'd rather not see. Your fire inside feeds your growth.

The fact that light casts a shadow remains one of the paradoxes of fire. Flame also produces smoke, a kind of shadow too, yet we were born to face this conundrum, thanks to the fire inside of us. We are both dark and light.

Our own shadows can feel heavy at this time of year. As I write this, I am sitting through another snow squall, witnessing March coming in like a lion. I'm turning to the energy of Pisces to sooth last month's excessive Aquarian energy. The Sun is in Pisces with Venus, approaching Neptune, Venus' higher octave, so reality may at times feel dreamy and watery too. We can allow ourselves to be rocked in these watery energies within us, our fire finding balance. The seed needs both too.

Believe in Spring

One morning last week the weather was so warm I forgot to stoke the fire. I was caught up in doing and I forgot that at this time of year, the fire always needs tending. The last few months have felt like that. My inner fire needed some tending, and this school holiday has given me that. I needed some time to rest and feel into the warmth that was growing. I needed to believe in Spring.

Flowers are surprising. Pictured here is an image of Cleomes I drew last Summer, strong and sticky. I don’t know Cleomes very well. I was pleasantly surprised when, the other day, thinking of my business and how I wanted it to grow, going through old notes, I discovered this drawing I had forgotten I had made, on a warm, sweet day, of a strange, exciting flower. I look forward to the blooms that will grow with me this Summer. I dream of connecting to them and sharing my musings with you in the coming months.

Let me know if you would like to discuss a Spring collaboration. I have a few spots available for three or six month one-on-one creative coaching programs, to support you as you rise into the Spring on the wings of your inner fire. What will the Spring bring for you? I am currently working on a creative writing project with a client and a green business venture with a curator turned entrepreneur. You can make an appointment to speak with me about your project here.

In the meantime, keep stoking your fires!

Love,

Amy

The Full Moon in Pisces: Full Artistic Expression

A painting by Lorre Strain Welsh

An Artistic Life

This Full Moon had me on vacation, thinking about the artistic life. I am spending time with my partner’s mother who is an artist in her 90’s. Her house is filled with a lifetime of paintings and artwork that embody her devotion to her craft. She still sits in the corner and paints. Her paintings are often tributes to her large family: she also has 5 kids and three times as many grandkids. Her life-long productivity impresses me, and has me thinking about how I want to spend the rest of my days.

Essential Purpose

I was able to ask her a few questions about her practice. The first thing she said was that she always knew she would paint and draw, she was born to do these things. Feeling this purpose in your artistic expression is essential. Similarly, I always knew I would write. What is your “I always knew” form of expression?

Essential Practice

We need to listen to this calling daily and take action, building up our practice in small ways, and in this way building up the material results of our practice too. Like a matriarch surrounded by her children, she must feel full and proud to be surrounded as she is by her paintings, the fruit of her labor. She said she always made it a priority, even though it wasn’t always her husband’s priority and may have cramped his style.

Perfection Isn’t Human

On the difficulty that arises when we seek the perfect, she said that perfection isn’t human. We talked about embracing the flaw. Imperfections become an element that draws attention to our very human acts of creation. We need not let the constraints of others constrain our own work. Watching her teaches me that we can dare to be our own imperfect forms of creation.

A Full Moon of Full Emotion

With this creative inspiration in the background of the deep rest of my vacation, this Pisces Full Moon spoke to me of feeling the fullness of emotion, and in this fullness, learning to let the feelings go. Letting things go means feeling them fully, noticing what I put into myself to feel full, and allowing myself to feel the full feelings.

Feeling Feelings

The feelings that make me feel full aren’t always desired feelings. I’m learning to allow myself to feel the pleasure, itself a kind of fullness, of feelings I’d rather banish to some far and distant part of myself. If I banish feelings, I can’t feel them fully, and I can’t let them go. This is why shame is so harmful to us. Shame keeps us from feeling things fully, and thus from fully processing and releasing difficult experiences. They build up in our psyche and then we can’t even begin to know what it is to feel full of pleasure or joy. The truth is, if you are feeling an emotion, it is asking you to feel it fully, so you may as well do so without question. This doesn’t mean you need to act on it, but you can allow your body to hold it, and feel into it without judgment.

Safely Holding Emotions

We need to build a container to do this though, especially if we have trauma that has taught us that our bodies are not safe containers for our feelings. A relationship with another human can help us hold and process feelings, as can our relationship to the Earth. We can build the container at an altar, in the forest, with a tree. Find a safe place to go to in order to feel what you need to feel.

Watery Release

Pisces thinks the bath is best. Water takes on our emotions and allows us to drain them out, releasing and letting go. Or if you can, take your emotions to the sea. The sea constantly carries away what we shed, over and over again, rhythmically. You can ask the sea to take away your full emotion by throwing a rock or letting the sand run out of your hand. You can also go to a river or stream, where, rushing or flowing, your emotion will meander over stones and be set free.

Artistic Practice as Container

Our artistic practice can also be a container for our processing of emotions. We might not make art from this that we want to present or sell, but we can use our creative expression as the container that helps us feel and release emotion. Creative expression can help us heal painful emotions. Poetry has often served this function for me.

Virgo Season

The Sun is currently in Virgo, where it shines on the watery world of Pisces. Virgo is opposite Pisces on the wheel of the Zodiac, and in some ways this mutable earth sign contrasts with the fish’s mutable water energy. In other ways it is the perfect compliment. As I apply Virgo tactics to my full Piscean range of emotion, I have a model for the practical application of my art. Virgo season makes lists. I need to make time to do the things I want to do, the things I need to do, on my list. I need to practice my craft in real time, not just in make-believe or dream time. Finding time for completion is necessary, and this is what I might focus on in the coming weeks. I will have to quarantine when I get home and I have things I want to finish. As we move to the New Moon, which will be in Virgo, I can feel accomplished in my artistic expressions, and like the beautiful maiden in the stars, complete unto myself and whole.

Where are the Plants?

I realize I haven’t mentioned the plants in this download! Maybe it is because I am away from my garden. I know that my sunflowers have blossomed and my squash plants are still flowering and waiting for me to come gather their fruit. The plant life where I am is rather muted, by golf course and strip mall, but I know that this is all the more reason to go outside and reach out. If you want to do so where you are, check out my free guide to plant communication. You can sign up for it here. I’d love to talk to you about your creative process and you can sign up for a free talk about it here. I help people, especially women, create the container - be the container - in which their creativity can blossom.

A picture my niece took of my garden! The Sunflowers are blooming!

As ever, my flower essences are available for purchase and I can help you choose a personalized one with a private consultation.

I hope your Summer ends sweetly and your blossoming leads to many fruits.

Love,

Amy

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

A New Moon Wind: Virgo vs. Pisces or How to Love Your Non-Duality

The divided world… Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, 11th Century

I woke up last Friday to the sound of the wind, blowing from the South, and I thought of the forest fires in the Amazon and the hurricane preparing over the southern oceans. Where was I feeling this storm, this burning? A few weeks ago I had the shingles and felt that they were the reflection on my skin of the forests in Siberia burning. The Amazon, I think, I’m feeling as a burning from within. There is a rage at how things ARE. I observe this destructive time and the small or big ways I see it all around me. Then there are the ways this destructive time is within me, and I am a part of it.

I recently I bought a car. This is something I thought I would never do, since I saw the car as the epitome of all I dislike about our current system: speed, waste, environmental destruction, blind humanity racing towards its own demise. But the reality of living in rural Vermont has dawned on me and to my surprise, now that I have bought one - with all the harrowing emotions of the first time! - having a car is one of the most freeing things I have ever done. So I’ve had to hold these two parts of myself as one: the me that hates using fossil fuels and the me that loves to be independently mobile and who is a very part of the destructive world I can observe as if I were separate.

This realization was humbling. Seeing the world as separate from ourselves equals holding ourselves above it, and I think so many of our problems come from this perceived division between ourselves and the world around us. I put a barrier between myself and others, between me and the Earth and Sky, because I fear that I can’t integrate my own complexity. But my recent illness taught me once again that we are one: my body is your body is the Earth’s body.  

When I sat down to listen to the wind, the New Moon in Virgo spoke to me of duality. Virgo wants to do everything right (one of the first things I saw when I woke up was the image on the right, the cover of a magazine on the kitchen counter!) and on Friday the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars and Mercury were all there, in Virgo. That’s called a stellium in astrology speak, and that’s a lot of energy focused on everyone wanting to do everything right. My Sun is in Pisces who sits opposite Virgo in the sky, which means that all of these planets were hanging out reflecting the light of my natal Sun, my shining Self (some call it the ego). Pisces, in some ways, represents the opposite of wanting to do things right. Sometimes Pisces is the opposite of doing anything at all. Virgo is about distinction, contrast and duality, while Pisces is about merging, nuance and ambiguity. Virgo doesn’t want to go with the flow. Pisces is content to sit in the water and float. Sometimes she doesn’t even care if she is going anywhere. So I know this duality. And we all have it, just as we all have all the other contrasts that the sky represents for us: the outgoing and the shy, the confident and the embarrassed, the joyful and the depressed. These all make up a part of the little fractal beings that we are and each one of these parts is illuminated differently by the stars at different times. It can be a lot to get used to. Especially with all the planets staring at you.

So just as the darker parts of ourselves can seem overwhelming at times, sometimes the devastation we see on the outside, especially if we focus on it exclusively, can seem like a lot. People are more or less touched by it and we all have different strategies for dealing with it at our disposal. I think it is good to remember this too, that we are all touched differently by the outside world, with more or less privilege and protection, and this realization can also bring its own breath of welcome humility. As for my strategies, I tend to search for historical explanations and create through it, that is I use the catastrophe to motivate me towards some form of artistic expression, or the destruction becomes the matter for creation. I like seeing the big picture too, and if this doesn’t work, I notice my divisive thoughts and choose not act on them. I may choose to open them up for discussion with a trusted friend or two. This often reveals my contradictions for what they are and helps me step back into a more holistic view. The plants also help me do this. They are constantly reminding of the blessings in perceived difficulty or darkness. I realized my illness – the shingles! – as uncomfortable as it was, was also an introduction to the healing powers of Saint John’s Wort, who is now forever in my heart, in my apothecary and within my body of skills as a healer to offer when someone else might have need for it.

It’s also good to see our one-sided vision for what it is: a kind of blindness. Not that we should ignore the calls for change, the new wind that is blowing, which are becoming louder and more demanding by the day, but just that we should insist on seeing the whole picture, for ourselves and the people around us. My whole picture includes driving a car but also doing a lot of work on the land and in my community in order to embody the change I want to see. It’s not going to be perfect, I’m not going to do everything right, but I am going to live in my corner of the world and shed light and peace around me, as much as I can. You are probably doing this too.

The fires are burning and the animals are dying, but more and more people are waking up. It’s as if the fires are lighting up collective consciousness, showing us the way. And in the burning, there subsists a little green. I talked to a fisherman the other night and he said there were no fish in the streams, but I took a walk through the woods to a pond and saw them, small, swimming upstream. I don’t know where the world is going, but I know it’s going to be okay. I’m becoming more and more friends with myself every single day.

A friend sent me bits of this poem by Mary Oliver the other day. Here is the whole thing, for her, and for you. It captures something.

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

                                             1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

                                             2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

                                             3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
   still another.

                                             4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

                                             5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
   change.
Congratulations, if
   you have changed.

                                             6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
   fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
   your life—
what would do for you?

                                             7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

***

The poet is clear here, so I don’t need to say anymore.

Love and later summer gleaming,

Amy

P.S. Let me know how this new moon felt to you by getting in touch (amy@enosburghessences.com) or setting up an appointment to talk!