With the intensity surrounding the Grand Cross I have been offering my full paid report at no cost since March. After today I will be sending the shorter, free version to free subscribers and the full version to paying subscribers. I am offering a special rate in the June: $45 for 1 year, and $30 for 6 months. Thank you for supporting this work! Subscription TypeJUNE SPECIAL 6 Months $30.00 USDJUNE SPECIAL 1 Year $45.00 USD
Moon to Moon Report: May 31 to June 11
Circle of the Owl Grandmothers and the Holy Banquet of My Body
We have all been unwinding, unraveling from the impact of the Grand Cross. Our firmaments have been shaken. Growth is not always a pretty process, lovers! It can feel acutely uncomfortable, as we stretch and emerge from our safe armoring and protected selves and into new territory.
The Gemini New Moon, which was exact on Wednesday and especially potent for ceremony through this evening (Friday) floods us with the many archetypes of Gemini: Coyote, Heyoka, the Fool in the Tarot Deck, Puella Eternis (Eternal Child, or Peter Pan), and the Psychopomp (she who travels between worlds) as our muses and teachers for the month to come.
We have been feeling the trickster coyote energy these past few days, and it may ruffle our feathers, spark restlessness, cause us feel a little crazy down in our bones. Some of us might even have been feeling a bit “bitey” lately–cranky, snappy, bitchy.
Some of this trickster energy is downright odd, and twisty, foreshadowing Mercury’s approach to retrograde station, exact on June 7. Mercury will remain retrograde until July 2nd, primarily in the sign of Gemini–amplifying the trickster dynamic through all of June.
Already I have seen so much communication short-circuiting, where so many connections are happening at one time, so much wanting to move forward in an instant (thank you also Mars Direct!), we might miss a communication from another, or have our own message not received, or distorted, and feel bewildered by the disconnect.
Gemini, like Coyote in the Native American tales or the Fool in the Tarot Deck, is a holy teacher. Always a mirror (especially with Mars now traveling direct in Libra), Coyote’s foolish antics can be likened to our monkey mind and its need to meddle with everything and in the process make a big stinky mess.
How have our monkey minds been meddling with us since Wednesday? The best way to work with coyote’s teaching wisdom is to observe our foolish patterns (or those of others) with humor and a detachment, and make the conscious choice to learn from, and choose a different path.
Sometimes there is also the need to forgive ourselves (or others!) for the places where we fall short, laugh it up, dust ourselves off, and move forward from a place of greater humility, humor, and with a lightened heart–remembering that our folly makes us part of the human family, connects us from our holy, raunchy hearts.
In the Muck
These past weeks since the Scorpio Full Moon many of us have experienced the “muck” of our shadow: how it is to wrestle with and see our old demons rearing their heads. Our old energy patterns feel desperate to re-assert themselves with greater vehemence right now because of their fear of being obliterated by our new heart-centered being-ness which is in the messy process of birthing.
Our old orientations of fear, attachment, resistance to change, addiction: we may have seen and felt these arise with great overwhelming power. If we attempt the more warrior approach of direct confrontation and annihilation, we might experience the old maxim-“what we resist persists”-and find ourselves even more deeply pulled in, and doing more of what we didn’t intend.
Again, invoking coyote wisdom as well as Gemini mastery of duality, sometimes the best way to move out of old patterns is not to seek and destroy, but to use a more meandering, diversionary, approach. Stepping aside, observing, giving our scared little kid or overly controlling inner Patriarch or Matriarch something that comforts them and keeps them busy as we go about our business.
As the “Puella Eternis” (Peter Pan) archetype of Gemini also joins us this month for our journey, we might have noticed ourselves procrastinating and getting distracted–“pretty colors!!!” instead of getting focused on the tasks in front of us. We might find ourselves returning again and again to what feels energizing and fun and supportive to our playful, spiritual sides–then feeling cranky and overburdened by the work that never seems to get done!
Again, I feel this is the tension between our old lives and ways of being and our emergent, shiny new baby selves who are wanting to spend WAY more time having fun, playing, creating, rather than staying stuck in the old much that’s heavy and dead-feeling.
When we fully claim our capacity as co-creators with life, we begin to embrace the hard-feeling as well as the easy parts, knowing they are ALL steps in the Great Dance, and that we are fully capable of meeting-and often transforming-them into strength, resilience, and greater wholeness.
We are no longer victims with too much to do and too little time, but we instead acknowledge our part in creating this fullness in our lives, ask for supportive guidance in what to take on first, what to release, and then we get grounded and steady in our approach, and return to a good and supportive flow of work and play in balance.
The Great Tree Has Fallen
I was recently reminded of a Big Dream I had at a previous time of intensity: shortly after we had invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003. I was in graduate school, honing my skill as an environmental writer and immersed in the question: how can modern human culture be transformed to care for the Earth?
At the time of my dream I was in despair, seeking and failing to find a sense of hope for the future. I had begun to believe the earth, the indigenous, the feminine, were not strong enough to survive the onslaught of dominator culture, which in those George W. Bush days was so clearly in hyper-drive.
In the dream I saw an enormous tree that had fallen, causing massive tremors in its wake. It was staggering in size. What caught my attention was the great mound of fresh soil unearthed where its roots had burst from the ground.
This soil had a wonderful, fertile, new feeling about it. I had a little red Geo Metro car at the time, and I found that it was even smaller than normal and insubstantial. I could pick it up, and toss it aside if I wished.
I recognized in this dream the World Tree, which in many ancient cultures, especially Native American and Indo-European, represented the sacred link between Heaven and Earth. It is an ancient concept also mirrored in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the universal indigenous concept of the Four Directions, as well as the Grand Cross we just experienced.
In the midst of the dream, I felt as though the car held the energy of the Earth-devastating, fossil-fuels-based modern human culture. It no longer seemed powerful, or substantial, in contrast to the great organic upwelling of fresh new earth, which appeared so abundant, life-giving, fresh, and above all, hopeful.
What I felt as I awoke was a clear recognition that something much bigger, older, and more resilient than my understanding was coming alive in the wake of so much death and destruction.
Today, in the wake of the Grand Cross Activation it can feel for us as though the World Tree has fallen. Our pillars of stability–old identities around career, a marriage, our home, our relationship to our children, our old relationship to our bodies-may have crumbled and fallen, leaving us unmoored. Circle of the Owl Grandmothers and the Holy Banquet of Death
This morning in half awake asleep meditation I felt the Circle of the Grandmothers surrounding me, in stillness and potent power. They felt the pain and unrest I have been carrying inside, and they heard my prayer to allow all those aspects of my life that are ready to die, to die.
They lay me in the center of their circle and they anointed me with oils, sang over me. One grandmother became a kind of Raven, or Crow Woman, as she sang and smudged me with her iridescent black wing. At one point I saw that they were all owls, these grandmothers, Owl Women, of wisdom and special knowledge of the death rites.
They prepared me for death, massaging my feet, singing over me. They staked my outstretched arms and my legs into the earth in the shape of a cross to ensure I stayed connected to and merging into the Earth.
Then it was time for the death feast, for the more-than-human-community I was to give myself to. The fox came, and the coyote, even a wolf with wild eyes. A vulture, crows and ravens, all came to feed on me, to tear off my flesh and pick my bones.
Then the beetles and the flies, and their larvae, all the microorganisms, receiving the abundance of my flesh. And I saw too that the beautiful green tree and the plants beside and above me partook in the banquet that was my body.
I felt as though I had merged with the Earth, I was weighted and melted into her arms, and yet I felt supremely free.
As I consider the Great Tree of our Age which has fallen, I consider that in our conversation about death and rebirth I am the first to jump over the topic of death and into the arms of “birth,” as though we can have one without the other.
Yet death is not only terrifying, she is also beautiful, and holy. She is our ally on the path, our beloved beneath it all. To know life better, we must come to look her in her wild eyes, acknowledge her constant presence at our side, and the inevitable change she represents. For death, and our fear of her, is ultimately about our fear of change.
And life without change is not life at all, but a nightmare of repetition and horrors.
So yes, we shall make fertile nurse logs from all our fallen trees. We shall rise up out of the fresh soil unearthed from the death of our current giants and grow tall, and strong, creating the new connections between Earth and Sky, Heaven and Earth.
Yet before the rise comes the fall and descent, which has a quality all its own that embraces us, and provides us with a special quality of mothering, nurture, and sacred connection to the web of life. So let us greet the dark and the light both with willingness and open hearts, and so heal the great wound that has emerged from our polarization to life and light only.
Comments