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

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

Goats in the Tree: Slowing to Eclipse and Surrendering to Capricorn in 2020

The Tree Climbing Goats of Morocco

Since the Winter Solstice, I’ve been going slower and slower, surrendering to this time of the year and to the demands of my body. On one side of the December 25th New Moon and Solar Eclipse, I fell on the ice and sprained my wrist. On the other, I got a cold, caught from my wonderful, visiting nieces and nephews. I felt depleted, underground, depressed. I lost sight of my purpose and felt pain. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t do much of anything. I had to surrender. What did I surrender to?

First I surrendered to the New Moon in Capricorn. Capricorn energy is a goat scampering up a huge mountain, from the depths to the heights he strives, but the going is tough and he doesn’t have much room on the ledges he chooses to pause on. During a climb, there is always that part of it where you have to surrender to the fact that you are climbing. I read that it wasn’t a good New Moon for making intentions and for manifestation and I felt this too; it was better to observe. So that is what I did.

Uphill, downhill. I trudged and drove up and down, back and forth between my house and the house where my family was gathered. As happens when family is about, I had to see and surrender to the things in my life that I don’t like. If I am a goat, it means I don’t mind going where it is hard for others to go. I’m climbing towards the sun even when it is dark. I’m climbing out of the cave, off of the page. Restrictions. I think this was all good practice for the year to come. It will be a year filled with this Capricorn energy. We’ll have to adapt as best we can as Saturn conjuncts Pluto in Capricorn. Right now, as I write, Jupiter is there conjunct Mercury. The Sun is moving through it towards Saturn and Pluto which are almost conjunct. I don’t know how anyone can imagine moving quickly. I can barely move at all, what with all these goats trying to climb and so little room. I’m left laughing though, with that image in my mind of the goats that climb the tree. Maybe that is a better image of the year for me. The tree the goats like to climb is an Argan tree, which grows in Morocco and produces one of my favorite oils. It whispers to me of abundance in aridity and longevity; it’s known for keeping the skin youthful. I’ll keep that message with me.

I’ve been thinking about what an eclipse is. In expressions, to eclipse something means to leave it behind, in the dust, to make it disappear. Literally an eclipse means that darkness, the moon, covers the light, the sun, leaving a halo before moving on and revealing the light to us again. This ring of fire exists because of the darkness, reminding us of the sun and how it will come again. On this side of the Solstice, though we are still deep in Winter, I know that the buds on the empty trees are already getting ready, beginning to swell, light yellow on the horizon amidst the grey. But first there is more to let go of, and often an eclipse will help release things we have been unwilling to release.

With letting go we find restrictions too. Sometimes I feel bound by the things I want to keep. Yet what is hardest to let go of? I realized this season that, ironically, what is hardest to let go of is what I don’t like about myself. These parts are hardest to let go of because I haven’t owned them yet, I don’t even want to see them. How can I accept these parts of the real me that I don’t like? I found that just being with them, instead of fighting with myself about them, or thinking about how I could change them, made them fit to my skin, and though itchy at first like a wool suit, I found I could adjust to them and then slough them off, letting them drop in the fire, like the thoughts that come unbidden in the morning, reminding me of my failures or shortcomings. I could befriend them. I could even feel happy and content with them. I could enjoy my family gatherings with a cold. I could be with people and not have to do anything. My hurt wrist prevented me from overdoing, trying to please, or even doing the minimum to help. I had to sit back and surrender to the restrictions of my injury. It wasn’t so bad actually. Everyone helped me and no one complained. I even got to be a little bit princess-y. So though I felt down, I also felt held in the dark, thankful for sleep and rest. These days I wake up in the mornings thrilled to be in my warm bed, with no thoughts at all in my head. I’ve taken the time to do nothing.

So as we move into 2020, it’s heavy there on the South Node, with all those goats in the tree. Maybe that’s you and me. Maybe the smartest thing to do is not to move at all, for we might fall and I don’t think I can catch you. But if we balance, if we let things be, we might get through, and hear the wind in the trees, and what the essence of the tree is telling us to do. I’m starting to get an idea. Are you?

If you want to talk about the cosmic energies, and the ones the plants might be whispering about to you, make an appointment with me here. I’m currently accepting new creatives who would like to deepen their creative practice by honing their Earth connection with the plants for three or six month online, one-on-one programs. What would it be like to work with me? Make an appointment for a free consultation to find out!

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

Stars Are Arrows that Arrive: Taking Action With the New Moon in Sagittarius

Mugwort in the frost…

It is the first day of December. Last night, in the waxing moonlight, the stars were a reflection of the snow-sparkle on the ground, and I was held between in the clear and silent cold as I walked up the hill to my home. I didn’t want to be anywhere else, just there, breathing in the cold air and hearing only the crunch of my steps, dizzy from tipping my head back to feel the sky. I’m slightly off my moon cycle blog writing schedule, but today feels like a good day to give you the download from last Tuesday’s New Moon in Sagittarius.

Sagittarius is a fiery sign, the image of a centaur letting an arrow fly, Chiron, or the son of Pan, Crotus, who invented archery. Both of these images represent someone taking action, and this is what my download was about. I saw myself taking action on my desires, and thinking about how to become more skilled at doing this.

Taking action has never really been my strong point. I sat on my dissertation for a long time. I enjoy the feeling of having lots of time and not having to take action. I like putting things off to the point that I have sometimes missed opportunities. I can over identify with the feminine energies of allowing, of being passive and responsive instead of assertive, so I know I need to bring some balance to this aspect of myself. Maybe it is also how I define myself that keeps me from being active. I was programmed to see myself as a woman, learned early on how to identify as a victim, and spent much of my early adult life putting myself in dangerous situations which allowed me to learn that I needed to protect myself. On my bulletin board there is a card I have travelled with for a while, the image of a princess waiting, fragile and sore. The romantic ideal relies on this idea of a passive female figure. To my credit, as much as I have identified with this version of the feminine, I have also always loved mythological female figures that are active, daring and dynamic. Diana hunts, Athena wages war and commands the intellect, Medusa turns you into stone with her eyes. Yet it is hard sometimes to forget the negative perception of active female energy, best summarized in our western ideology by the story of Eve and the apple. My experience has taught me as much. How many times have my actions resulted in rejection, in coming across as too much, in being misunderstood? And though I love envisioning female desire as active, it is often easier to sit back and not take action. I feel safer that way, and when I want to take action, a lot of fear comes up. So I’ve often gone back and forth between these two extremes, conscious of when I accepted being passive, then revolting against it. A lot of my intellectual work as revolved around thinking about love and working out how to imagine both sides of the love equation as active. Maybe part of the problem is the polarity of this thinking: I’m either doing or not doing. Maybe there is a middle ground, and if there is one, I think it is located in the seed of my desires.

My desires, especially my deepest ones, do not want to be given short shrift or left in the closet of my consciousness. Lately I have been paying attention to them, unearthing them and accepting them. My desires are powerful, they are keys to creation, and if I want to improve the world, I need my will, however refused or demeaned it has been. I think it is important though to be able to define true desires versus false or imposed desires. My material needs are met, so I need to be wary of wanting more, in a superficial way. And it is important to know why we have certain desires. Are they coming from the right place? Do I want something or someone because I need reassurance or attention, or is my desire the reflection of a deeper need, a universal imperative for the good of all? Lately I seek to identify which of my desires deserve to be held up to the light of manifestation. Which ones are false projections and which ones are true?  

Which leads me to action. Which desires do I want to take action on? Will my actions harm anyone or anything around me? It seems to me that the desires that come from a true place within me are easy to take action on, whereas those that are superficial feel harder to act on, sometimes come from a place of fear, and have the potential for negative fallout. But if I can first identify my true desire, I can then work on right action. This all feels very hypothetical to me at the moment. Let me see if I can give you an example, related to my work with the plant world:

When I started my business, it came from a place of wanting to share my gifts with the world in a way that would improve the situation of the Earth and her inhabitants. Taking action at first came easily, and still does, when I listen to the plants. They remind me of our interconnection, and point me in the right direction. They help me see my true desires. Mugwort reminds me I want to see clearly through my dreams, so I need to write them down in the morning. White Pine has lately been reminding me I want to stay healthy through the winter, I want to feel grounded and safe, and if I tune into these desires, I know which actions to take on a day to day basis: drink lots of water, spend time outdoors. Lemon Verbena reminds me to relax, and leads me to using her salve in certain ways. Somehow, listening to the plants helps me identify my true desires and be able to activate my will in a way that will not harm and will help myself and others. Sometimes it is hard to listen to this outer voice of my desire, but I find that if I listen from a place of connection, I can stay in the flow of my action and I will not cause harm . This leaves me in a place of gratefulness and right relationship. Listening to the plants brings me home.

This reminds me of an Aleutian story I learned this summer, Fox Woman, and how, after many trials, her running steps planted stars. I wonder how you integrate and contemplate your desires, and how they lead to your actions. If you would like to talk to me about how to feel more interconnected and how to take action based on this feeling, make an appointment with me here! I would love to talk to you about how to activate more heart-centered actions, and this dark time is a good time to unearth some forgotten desires. I’d love to hear what the plants have to say about yours, and help you listen in yourself.

Here is to all your pointed arrows that reach their destinations and arrive, shining brightly and leading you home.

Lots of still and frosty 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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!

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

Tending the Fire Inside: Shingles, Lughnasadh and the New Moon in Leo

The last month has been a deep delving into old-new territory. Things feel familiar and strange at the same time. There was some travel. I flew to England. I spent a few days in story with wonderful teacher and story master Martin Shaw and new friends on the same path of searching within myth time for meaning. I watched the partial full moon eclipse with them by a fire and didn’t write an update here, too much in the shadows to share. I wandered for a day on the moor in Devon and had what I think was an initiation with Hawthorn that I’m still digesting and wondering how to share. I went to an academic conference and shared research I did a few years ago on Wilton Abbey and the women that read there in the 13th century. I recently had an important realization about the relevance of this side of my work. A discussion in July with an evolutionary astrologer Sabrina Monarch which led to a discovery about my life mission: not speaking for the flowers but bringing the past to the present. Maybe speaking for the flowers also brings the past to the present in a way. I’m nurturing forgotten connections, often feeling I’m in direct contact with plant ancestors when doing so, and this, like academic research, takes some time and processing. Then I went to Montreal for a few days (the city! the botanic garden! the market! the heat! the poutine! the nine breathing bodies in the hostel room!) and got the shingles.

So now I’m home in Vermont with the shingles, feeling the burning under my skin, deep in the nerve system, and how it reflects the ripening time out there: this fire inside of reds and yellows and oranges that has come to the surface. I feel like my illness is also the culmination of the eclipse time when I was working with my shadows and focusing on what I wanted to release: here is the proof on my skin, blisters of what I want to be free of, my own dis-ease in the world. There is anger there, diffuse, at the way the world turns, at the men in charge, at the way I am seen, at the damage done. A first harvest of this, erupting. I like working with illness this way. How do my symptoms reflect what I am feeling? How do they reflect what is happening in the world? It helps to bear the illness not to take the symptoms too personally, and to understand how our understanding of the symptoms is a part of the healing. I’m taking Saint John’s wort tincture made by a neighbor, a mushroom tincture made by a local herbalist, Swiss Echinacea tincture, and an antiviral while slathering my sores in Saint John’s wort oil (made before I left and left outside while I traveled) and calamine lotion. Let me know if you want to know more about my protocol that seems to be doing me well! A good mix of allopathic and herba medecine, after an urgent visit to the doctor, though I do not wish this tingling painful curse of secret stocked virus on you.

Lughnasadh is the Celtic festival of the ripening time, when everything is at its most green. It celebrates the god Lugh, of the Long Arm, the Shining One, god of the spear and the sun. The Romans associated him with Mercury, who appropriately went direct this week. We are now called to move forward boldly with our skills. I had a fire last night to outwardly burn what needed to go, old remnants of words written long ago and some herbs saved through the seasons to give to the fire and purify our purging. Life is quick and flowing now. The monarchs are out and they never rest. The robins have placed three more pale blue eggs in their nests, and the bird song is crystalline in the forest. I saw a doe with two fawns across the pond, flicking flies away with the whites of their tails. Life runs quickly now, and I’m in it and I don’t know how to catch it. I don’t try. It’s warm and fast and busy and buzzing. I feel in this sanctuary here, where you can still hear the world the way it wants to be heard, where the silence isn’t silence and the stars still sing as they are born. And I’ve been drinking the richest raw milk and fermented things and sleeping, and dreaming of the gifts I want to offer the world. 

And yet death is also here, perhaps never so present as during the peak of the harvest. Lugh’s grandfather was Balor who lived in the underworld. While I was away my old rabbit died, after fourteen years of companionship, and it’s hard to be without him now, my old friend who was so true. The eclipse time is one of leaving. In the forest I found Ghost Pipe clusters and a deer skull with some teeth still in place. I could wriggle them but not get one to come out. I don’t know how to read the signs of this death. I can only stare. And the shingles burning makes me think of my own certain demise, our brightness that will one day burst into darkness and go back to the earth, or maybe the stars. So the wheel comes around again, and we know that we are living bright and special days of leaves and flowers and sounds. And I am grateful and tend to the fire inside. The new moon is a special time for this tending, after the dark moon and the dying. I made a wish on Jupiter who came out first and bright last night, and saw a long-armed shooting star who took my wish on. I like thinking of Lugh and the Lion as bright bearers of this month’s intentions.

Blessings to your fires of summer! Please get in touch if you are interested in following the cycles of the year with me. New offers are a two-hour class on plant communication and flower essence making and individual creative coaching with the plants. I’d love to talk to you about them and you can make an appointment here. You can also support me on Patreon where I offer plant inspired poetry and flower wisdom. I’d love to roll into autumn with you, with whatever you are releasing or calling in.

May your wheels keep smoothly turning and your harvests be fruitful!

Eclipse Season Drama: The Ending of the World and a Prayer for Summer

I’ve been waiting to post since the New Moon because of the eclipses. What do they want me to say? It has been a rich few weeks and I haven’t wanted to say much. I had a very deep essence making experience with Cramp Bark the weekend of the Solstice at a Flower Essence training and since then I have maintained a feeling of permanent connection to the green realm. As a result, I’ve felt disconnected from this one. Making the magic with plant connection lifts me up and sets me down differently. Cramp Bark essence will be part of a line of essences meant to aid shadow work. It isn’t up in my shop yet, but its message is about helping us embrace our whole selves, dark and light. Let me know if you want some. I call it Erasure of Duality. It helps us own the darkest side of ourselves, integrate our most difficult experiences and calm our harshest judgments which depend on our belief in polarity. I shared the poem she offered me with the second tier and up of my Patreon supporters. You can get the full download here. I’d love it if you wanted to join me there!

So I’ve met myself whole, with the help of the plant realm, and I’m looking for words to describe what that feels like.

But this New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer has me also searching to answer other questions. Within this unity, who am I? Who am I without my stories and my past? Cancer is about home and mothering and I am home with my mother, watching how she mother’s herself, how I mother myself, and the connections between the two, seeing the old patterns of feeling and relating with my father. Who am I without the stories of my parents? I learned that until we are three, we share our energy centers with them, so any insecurities or lack of self-love of theirs become ours. Ancestors pass things on to us too, down the gene lines, the DNA chain. Who am I without the steps of my ancestors? Depending on how far back you go, we also share our DNA with the trees. My wholeness resides there I think, back in the time of slow plant evolution, back to soil and bark and loam.

A total solar eclipse feels like the end of the world in some ways. Slowly the sun goes dark. I remember a children’s book I had when I was small about some farm animals who become increasingly panicked at the growing dark. They gather together and tremble. And eclipse season is a time of deaths, people go, we let go. I’ve been spending a lot of time with my very elderly rabbit, and Cramp Bark showed me how death is inside all life. I am constantly dying to outdated versions of myself. It feels good to let these selves go, but then arises the fear of the unknown. What if the Sun doesn’t come back? In Cancer we can feel like children in need of safety and reassurance. Especially today. If I watch the news, it feels like we are only minutes away from certain and complete disaster. Yet I wake and the birds are singing. I feed them and I eat and sleep and dream. I meditate and write.

With these thoughts in mind I wrote a prayer for summer. Feel free to recite it daily to your garden, and to add your own stanzas.

An Edward Burne-Jones Tapestry

A Prayer for Summer

May there always be
an abundance of birds
and the small insects
and larvae and caterpillars
they eat. May they always
mate and mate again,
nest and wait and feed
and nourish their young.

May there always be
moths beating their wings
at my window and
fireflies winking me to sleep.

May it always be hot
in the sun and then cool
in the shade or the lake
or river or pond or pool
before bed at twilight.

In the morning,
may the dew always come
to water the petals of my dreams.

May all things be allowed
to ripen and flourish and live.

May the peonies and the
lupines and the mallow
and the roses always say
there is more to come
more to come
more to come.

Cancer season also has me remembering and reading of how, as children, the gateways of our perception are open, and as we choose to open them again today, as if for the first time, there is the same awe and joy at what we find and see. This feeling comes first. I hope it still comes first for you, these ripening days.

Much 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

Flowers Are How a Plant Sees: A New Moon in Gemini and a Guided Meditation for the Seeds of Your Intentions

We have two eyes in our heads, twins on our faces.

Creeping Charlie: Glechoma

To step outside in a world full of blossom
flowers are how a plant sees
to step inside and under the trees
in the buzz that is bees
the breeze is large and forgiving
a gentle landing a posing down
flowers are how a plant sees

I welcomed a new moon this morning, took a walk in the sun along the river here and I’m now sitting by the fire as it has turned cold and wet, in typical Vermont fashion. I don’t mind. I don’t worry about the strangeness of the weather here. I feel safe and protected amidst the green. I don’t think I’m ignoring the problems, just coming back to center, and being as I need to be, growing connections that are meaningful to me, and embodying the change I want to see.

I didn’t write a post for the Full Moon in Scorpio two weeks ago, but I feel like I did a good job releasing all that it wanted me to release: I moved, cleaned out the contact list on my phone, and did everything in between, along with a lot of crying. Here I am now feeling taller and stronger and where I am supposed to be. I’m ending stories I’ve dreamed about ending. I’m making room for the new, and my dreams have been clearing me out too: they have been crowded with lots of stuff to sort and lose and let go of.

The theme for the last month has been clarity, and it rounded off nicely with a week of drinking Ground Ivy, Creeping Charlie, the Glechoma pictured about, a small plant that caught my eye in my parents’ yard, and realizing that flowers are how a plant sees. I suddenly realized how watched we are by them. I came back to Vermont to a sea of Dandelions that I harvested, ate, drank and tinctured. I’m taking Dandelion tincture for support and feeling very supported. I don’t think I would have been able to do all this letting go if I weren’t. I’m feeling very shiny and new, maybe thanks to ingesting the plants, and maybe because with all these new eyes seeing me, I can see clearer too. My plant diet with Chamomile started my journey, a golden road to a new kind of perception, where I know how I am seeing things and I can choose what I see. Then Ground Ivy took my hand and accompanied me, to tell me we have eyes all over our bodies to see things as they really are, unclouded by a false perception, where I am not loved, where I am not love. “We crawl everywhere to see and to show you how your very bones are loved, every ounce of you”. The Dandelion root in my coffee concurred. “You’ll become powder one day too, but we will still love you”. Roots have eyes too.

Eyes to see
all of me
down in the deep
container of soul
I hold elements
encased in darkness,
gold, uniting for change
seeing the truth
embracing the dark
shadow to light
holding both at once
in my sight

I have planted a lot with this new moon, and as I did, a meditation came to me.

I offer it to you:

Ground into the Earth and connect to the sky.
Feel held in their love and give them yours.
Imagine yourself as the new moon, dark and receptive.
Next become a field.
Open to receive seeds: these might be planted by hand (what do you want to grow?) or dropped by a bird or blown on a breeze.
See the seeds of your intentions being sown into you.
Allow them to settle.
Know that you don’t have to make them grow but only need to nurture them with the right amount of sun and rain and soil.
Know that every thought that comes to distract you from your desired outcome, the memory of past difficulty or pain or doubt, becomes excellent compost to feed the soil of your dreams.
See these thoughts becoming leaves that feed the soil.
Come back into your body and thank the moon for helping you grow.

If you are interested in reading more of my Earth channeled writing, I’d love it if you chose to support me on Patreon! By signing up for my email list on my homepage, you’ll know when I post on here and you’ll be kept abreast of my offerings (to be developed and continued soon…) and if you’d like to develop and strengthen your own Earth channel for creative inspiration, I’d love to help the plants help you! You can schedule an exploratory call here.

I wish you a wonderful growing season, powerful clearsightedness and lots of quiet time in natural places.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I’ll leave you with that.

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

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

Two Full Moons in Libra: Connection and What it Means to Be Human

We are officially in Taurus season now, and I’m feeling juicily rooted in Spring. It’s really happening. The branches are bursting into my favorite greens. Yesterday’s Full Moon, the second of two in Libra, had me fasting and darkly contemplative. What do I need to let go of? I thought of my relationships, as one does when a celestial body is highlighted in Libra. Some are falling away. I had very vivid dreams before the Full Moon and I fasted and did some inner alchemy work to open my own perception. I walked in the fathomless fathoms for a day. The world felt strange. But today I woke up clear-headed and I notice that the warm relationships around me are blossoming as I shed outdated versions of myself and commit to more fully living in my heart. As I let those relationships fall away that want to fall away, there is more room for fulfillment within those that are present. I hold them close to me.

First Libra Full Moon and Young Magnolia Tree

The Moon-Bathing Plants

The first Full Moon in Libra was on the Equinox and I didn’t write about it specifically, though I mentioned it in my last post. I took a walk in the night and experienced my connection to the moon-bathing plants. At the time I didn’t know how it was related to relationship for me, but in my evolution from that night to last night, I can see how the lunar cycle changed me. I think both moons taught me something about what it means to be human.

Movement Defines Life

Studying biology with my student, I am reminded that movement defines life. In movement, we encounter others, and this means that to be alive means to be in relationship. What kinds of relationship surround us? We relate to other humans, of course. We are born into a family and if we are deprived of relating we do not develop. We are beings of language and we know (from some sad, accidental “experiments”) that if we don’t relate to other people, we don’t get language. The kind of relating we get defines the kind of language we have, so the two are entwined, our words and our becoming human. Materialists are aware of this level of relationship. We are also, inevitably, as animals, in relationship to our environment. We can be aware, perhaps not always consciously, of our relationship to that which surrounds us. This is our Earth home, our ecology, and we cannot survive if we do not carry some sense of this awareness. There is another level of relationship that I am aware of and this is our relationship to the unseen realms, to spirits, to potential worlds, and to our imagination, which I believe is outside of us.

We Are Floating In Story

Hildegard von Bingen said that the soul is not in the body, rather it is the body that is in the soul, and I feel this: I feel as if our bodies are floating in this sea of relationship to soul or to source. As we are created by language, we are floating in story (as my teacher Martin Shaw reminds me), held by these unseen realms as though in a thick web of being and becoming. We are always moving within this unseen network that ties us to the land and the heavens, to the past and future. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming; maybe that is why our materialist society isn’t very good at seeing it.

Second Libra Full Moon and Street Lights

My relationship to the plants (first Libra Full Moon) has helped me see how my relationships to others (second Libra Full Moon) are conditioned by my ability to sense into how interconnected I am to the whole. If my sense of connection is missing on one of the levels I described above, whether interpersonal, environmental or spiritual, my relating will be off and I won’t be able to fully relate to anyone, including myself. Yet it is difficult to maintain this feeling state of interconnection in today’s world.

On Trauma and Connection

I posted an article on Facebook that I will share again here, on trauma and connection, which seemed to speak to many people who responded to the post. Perhaps many of us recognize on a deep level that this life is merely a process of becoming more and more connected again, where death is the final merging, and I think that is why I want to work with the plants and help others do the same: they bring us back to this feeling of connection to the whole that we, for the most part, are sorely missing.

Wood, On Some Level, Is Meant To Burn

When Notre Dame cathedral was burning in Paris, my first thought was that wood, on some level, is meant to burn. Wooden churches burned all the time in the Middle Ages. It is surprising that that roof survived for so long at all. Everyone was very sad about it. So much money poured in for the repairs. It seems to represent much more to people than starving families or devastated rain-forests, dying oceans or drowning islands. Many people on social media were critical of this, and I was too, though I can also understand the widespread dismay. It was something we wanted to hold on to, that we wanted to stay, a symbol of who we are, a reassuring fixture. Yet the medieval forest in the roof of that cathedral was in some sense waiting to rise into smoke. It is our human hubris to think that it needs to exist in order for us to feel a connection to our past or a spiritual connection. And I remembered my experience of Our Lady, Mary, whom I met in Corsica three years ago, brought to my knees, in tears, smelling roses as I passed in front of the church door - it was the strongest spiritual experience I have ever had and such a gift of forgiveness and wholeness. I, a Quaker, almost became Catholic, and with what I know about the history of the Catholic Church, that is saying a lot. I know her as a divine life force whose essence is the feeling of grace, who helps me remember my connection to the vast flower of life. She is invisible, though I do give her some form on my altar. Notre Dame is not a place; it is an energy, like love, that ties us together, and she wants us to feel connected again. Maybe that is why she burned that day. There was a general movement of support and communion around her glorious edifice. And her windows are intact. I was very pleased with that.

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

So, what does it mean to be human? It does feel hard to find the words for that, but this is my take on it, for what it's worth. I hope it is satisfying to you in some way. My thanks to Nicole for the prompt!

I worked on my website some more today: new buttons to connect to my Patreon page and a new page with my writing on it and a better home page design and some improved copy I hope.

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks but connected and happy to connect with you at any time. You can schedule a free exploration call with me or an energy healing session under the creative coaching and energy healing tabs on my website. Or you can write : amy@enosburghessences.com

May Our Lady bless your connections and hold you in the light.

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

Spring is tender. Spring is fierce.

View fullsize

Cicely Mary Barker

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

I Walked Home In Its Light

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

Pointy Green Suede Shoes

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

Humility, But A True Humility

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

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

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

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

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

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