NEW MOON IN LEO: The Pursuit of Fullness
This past week was deeply ripe with personal challenge, but the kind I’m very happy to meet. Recent farm work has left me feeling physically drained and sore, emotionally scattered, and freshly unfolded like paper, trapped in a pocket for far too long. Through my current avenues of purpose — my work through SUNMOON, growing nourishing food, working with the land, and being present for friends, family, and my own healing — these circumstances of life are teaching me to not only unfurl at my own pace, but to do so with heaps of self-kindness. As the saying goes, “it takes strength to be gentle and kind.” It reminds me of the lion, depicted in the Strength tarot card. There is no purpose or healing in forcing, coercing, or manipulating. In this card, I imagine the lion and the person who holds the lion’s mouth open are the same being. This kind of relationship with self takes time. It takes trust, and trust must be built. Most of us have somehow experienced harm towards our own willingness to trust ourselves and others, which is why the bond to self cannot be left to succumb. It will only solidify over time, and that folded paper will eventually morph into a lump of fibrous matter. During this new moon, I am considering the challenges I’ve faced, what I have learned from them, and why I choose to approach them or manifest them at all. The lessons there are handed to me by ancestors, the mysteries of the everything, and my own need to know. The wisdom therein is profound, as I know quite well that I learn and integrate through healthy challenge far more than sinking into familiar comforts.
A great example of something I tend to avoid as well the lessons it offers, depicted in this lunation’s collage, are cool natural sources of water. I love the heat of the sun, and the warmth of fire. I would rather lay out like a sleepy sunbathing cat and read under the sun far more than hike through a marshy wetland any day of the week. This comfort of warmth often limits my experiences, as I’ve noticed this summer when visiting swimming holes, rivers, and the coast of the Pacific Northwest. I’ll often approach these waters with hesitation, wading up to my knees, pausing and turning back once the cold reaches my thighs. It’s fun enough. It’s connected enough. Or so I’ve thought. In these moments I know there is something missing, especially as I watch others gleefully jump from the rocks into the welcoming waters below, dive and glide under its glassy surface, or simply float, allowing their watery bodies to become one with the water around them. The pang of desire will hit me, but instead of meeting it I’ll walk away, opting for the comfort of warmth.
I recently was gifted with a dream that felt so real and so important upon waking that I wished to meet its message that very day. In this dream, I suffered from a pain in the left side of my chest; a tender soreness directly above my heart center. I stood in a river, feeling the cold water creeping up my back and resisting, wanting to turn back. I suddenly knew, in that mysterious dream-minded way we do sometimes, that the cold water was what I needed to penetrate and heal the heat-fueled seed of pain that pulsed in my heart. In this space, the fires of anger and fury, the disappointments of the past, the pain of heartbreak and abandonment, and the screams of my inner infant self I could actively feel quelled when allowing my knees to give out, and giving gravity the chance to pull me into the water until my entire self was submerged. My body constricted, then released as a new fluid form of self.
Beginning that day, I made an effort to challenge my old habits. “How we do one thing is how we do everything” is a phrase that has haunted me for years, whispering towards me in moments of subconscious or conscious avoidance of that which heals me. When I eat too fast and think to slow down but don’t, when I am sore and think to stretch but don’t, when I feel the impulse to sleep early but don’t - I feel these words arise in my heart. The more I ignore this inner knowing, the more the awareness burns to be seen. It is a knowing that I sometimes don’t want to know. It’s inconvenient somehow to the sense of domination I want to feel over my life, of getting-what-I-want-and-nothing-else. Ignorance is said to be bliss, but really it’s nothing other than a hell of repetition shaped like welcoming arms. It takes rigorous self-honesty to admit that these arms do not hold. They inhibit, control, and constrict.
In seeking out the cold waters, I’ve found that consciously faced challenge contains powerful wisdom. I feel the history of my ancestry bathing in cool mountainous rivers, as well as working with their bodies to provide for themselves and their communities. I feel the cries and screams of my inner infant self begin to calm and slip into a state of deep sacred rest. I can sense my body learning to generate heat in a whole new way, accessing the sun inside. As I continue balancing my work inside in my studio, outside on the land, with others and with myself, I am called to lean on the infinite support of Creator, of the energy of all that is, and know that I am contributing as well each time I choose strength, however it may appear or be required as in a given time. We each are enormous, eternal, perpetual. These lessons were never meant to be faced and moved on from, but accepted and embraced, time and time again as they change and grow with us. All cats play. Lions love to engage in healthy sparring, batting and tossing each other as they learn, together, to grow stronger, more resilient, and both independent and interdependent too. This season asks us directly to spar with life in this way, facing the moments of challenge with a frisky and good-natured spirit - resting when we need, and finding nourishment in these moments of peace as we know that they are required as medicine to get up and face the enigmatic, sometimes puzzling, but always intentional lessons of life.
NEW MOON CARD PULL
Draw three tarot or oracle cards for each phrase and their complimentary questions, as seen below. Keep a journal handy. Write a single sentence that comes to mind immediately upon seeing each card. Do this before reading about the meaning of them. Once you have taken time to think on, read about, or meditate upon these, write a few more sentences for each, drawing your inner knowing up and out from pen to page.
◑ “a rolling stone gathers no moss.” WHERE AM I STAGNANT?
◑ “It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” HOW MAY I EMBODY STRENGTH AND KINDNESS TO SELF?
◑ “how you do one thing is how you do everything” WHERE SHOULD I BEGIN?
Wishing you all a glorious new moon.
