New Moon Reflection on Venus Genetrix

On the New Moon in Taurus, the time is here for rediscovering the simple, manifest parts of ourselves cradled within the sensory landscape of Nature’s consistency and reliable movements amidst the changes that have engulfed us all during the greater period of Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn stellium bridging Capricorn and Aquarius that signals the uprooting of the institutions whose integrity we took for granted, for the sake of some necessary greater evolution…

Earth Day 2020 is an enforced observance.

I grew up in the California coastal city where in 1969 following a huge oil spill off the coast, the call began for designating a day to celebrate the Earth as mother divine, and rally advocacy for her survival in the face of human threats. In recent years I have witness the Earth Day festival grow out of grassroots to a showcase of industries supporting the environment: organic food truck dining, permaculture demos, booths administering CBD samples and selling hemp clothing and seaglass jewelry, walk-throughs of tiny houses and displays of what green living looks like in the 21^st century, Teslas on display, representatives from local environmental groups educating the public and collecting petition signatures, and the alcoholic kombucha tents and stages with bands seeking to raise the public consciousness and appreciation of Our Mother.

This year I understood that these reminders of our interconnectedness with nature become mere trappings if we do not devote ourselves to conscious action for the sake of the environment regularly. Some of these trappings even fly in the face of the health of Earth: for instance, the insistence on consuming coffee with yak butter from the Himalayas, or eating quinoa that has been grown by large-scale industry where local farming populations are suffering, or eating almond butter produced in regions prone to drought, or flying 2,000+ miles to the Amazon for an ayahuasca retreat, as if there were only one substance in nature that could aid our self-understanding if we ingest it, bypassing the generations of shamans that were traditionally designated in many indigenous communities as those who could drink from the cup and commune with the plant spirit world, while Greta Thunberg will not board a plane.

Yes, I am feeling quite critical of the trappings, and also guilty of wearing them (well, not the ayahuasca piece – but I do practice forms of yoga traditionally reserved for the brahmins) at the expense of the environment itself.

Our growing edges as an environmentally-conscious community are many.

But of all the things we try to do and try to be seen doing to help Our Mother, She has taught me this Earth Day that I am doing the best I can to help her right now.

If allowed the opportunity, Nature takes care of herself, and of us. The pandas are mating for the first time in ten years at Ocean Park in Hong Kong. After 100 years, the first grey wolf has apparently been sighted in Normandy. A rare leatherback sea turtle is returning to the humanless beaches in Thailand and Florida. And two coyotes, a bobcat, and a grey fox visited my backyard in three days, as evidenced on the trail camera.

Now that we are in enforced isolation from each other, we are in greater communion with Nature, and are understanding that she doesn’t take very long to catch on to our lack of interference, and goes about accomplishing in a matter of weeks the goals for species protection and ozone health and clean waterways on which we have been struggling for years to gain purchase.

And we are like my neighbor’s robot sculpture clad with a mask, held back from normative behaviors, stalled and voiceless by the realization that we are not masters of nature; that we are a part of her body.

As my former colleagues in Classics at University College London say, time to go and pull your copy of Lucretius’ 1^st-century BCE Epicurean treatise De Rerum Natura (find a free, but antiquated, translation here).

This work on “The Nature of Things” is a didactic poem, a teaching poem that celebrates Venus Genetrix, Nature herself, that births and destroys, builds up and breaks down and builds up again in ever-resilient resourcefulness. Also, if you are critical of organized religion and the ways in which it challenges our communion with nature, you might well enjoy this work! Also, if you are interested in ancient atomic theory, there are some marvellous sections on the relationship between the two essential entities Lucretius claims underpin the natural world: form and formlessness, or atoms and the void (the space in which they move).

I would like to read Lucretius and thus experience a state of ataraxia, the Epicurean freedom from fear and pain in the mind that comes from rejection of religion and superstition and acceptance of the fundamental, mechanistic forces of nature that are ever-present in nature, but that’s a lot of conditions, and I do like my astrology, and God.

But the reading is not what does it for me these days.

It is breathing the outside air and hearing wild sounds. Finding new, rich colors in the ridges of the mountains, and cultivating awe at the visibility of the islands off the coast, as if they have drifted closer to the land. Walking through the neighborhood and hearing families talking and laughing, seeing a woman dancing in her living room, a couple sitting out on their deck drinking wine. Smelling jasmine, rosemary, honeysuckle, the gritty scent of pine. When walking yesterday I felt big shapes start to shift against one another in my customary perception of the world and the wild, and as I reached the crest of the hill near my house, I had come so far away from the narrow channels of linear thinking and traveling without really hearing and seeing the world around me that I began to fear the consequences of spending too much time in that expansive presence of mind and heart.

I realized in this radical and spontaneous mindfulness practice that the yoga I practice is often just as linear as all else I do, paying lip-service to presence and mindfulness through a rigorous program of physical postures that have a “peak”, an end, a telos. And the mental experience attendant to this has been having it in my mind that I am being present and mindful more than having the felt experience of such.

Last night I sat on the deck with my cat Toby and watched him listen to the birds. He teaches me that life can evolve a little from day to day, that life is evolving from day to day beyond the static projections of my mind, in imperceptible ways. Especially as Toby is a new member of the household as of last August, he teaches me to ask questions about why we are accustomed to do or think about things in this way or that way. Sometimes I have an answer. Often I don’t.

The considerable tragedy that remains for our own species is that millions around the world have lost their jobs, the source of their livelihoods and vocations now deemed “unessential” while those with essential jobs are exposing themselves to the virus every day at work, in the hospital, or the grocery store. And the rest of us have the distinct privilege of working from home and luxuriating in nature’s capacity to renew herself more quickly than we would orchestrate. And it is Nature herself that reminds us and challenges us to take care of those whom we know are struggling.

We are all forced to become shut-ins, observers, students of Nature. We are all forced onto the fringes because there is no center of normative behavior and interaction. And thus there are no designated retreat centers we can visit to find ourselves in nature. There are just the circumstances that have brought us to this place. The centers of our orbit prior to our hibernation. And it certainly is a once-in-a-lifetime chance we have to reflect on the centrality of those things in our lives, and how they may have at times stopped us from remembering:

We are ever in Nature, and we are ever part of Nature.

Happy Earth Day (Earth Year, as it is quickly becoming)!

The “Big Picture”: Insights from the New Moon, Ecopsychology, and Poetics

The Lunar New Year of the Rat and the New Moon in Aquarius. Time to think of the bigger picture. To find solutions through untried ways. To form community alliances to achieve strategic goals. To use guile to be the first animal across the river to win a place in the Chinese Zodiac. To observe nature and pour out insights which the poets and the painters and the visionaries will quaff.

What does this “big picture” (an infuriatingly obscure phrase, in my opinion) really look like? Do we assume a broad, aerial perspective of the terrain of our lives, and suspend sympathies with those who walk the roads whose trajectories we see from high above?

Is there just one big picture, one view from godlike transcendence?

Does the big picture denote the objective view? Or does it stretch the heart’s capacities for loving awareness (to use a Ram Dass-ism)?

One complicated “big picture” book

I’ve been reading Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, The Overstory, a great opus made up of small tales, all of which carry a distinct feature of transformation involving human relationships with trees. It is Ovid’s Metamorphoses meets contemporary ecocriticism. It is a narrative ekstasis, in that it somehow stands far beyond its subjects and still looks closely at individual lives in a series of distinct moments of tender and painful intimacy. It is difficult for me to understand when I am looking at the bigger picture and when what I think is the broad view turns out to be just a lick of paint in a mural without end. I am not even a quarter of the way through, because I read and pause and digest and dream. I read before I sleep, and I dream of Nature pressing against the walls until she plunges inside. I dream about mountain lions coming in through an unresolvable gap in the sliding glass door, before they brush against me and groom themselves in the living room as if I was one of their own.

One of the stories focuses on the experiences of a man who went from playing the role of a prisoner in Zimbardo’s ill-fated Stanford Prison Experiment to serving in Nam, and then working as a ranch hand in Idaho, before drifting aimlessly westward. Aimlessly, until he found out about the clear-cutting in the national forests through which he was driving. He paid a pilot to fly him over the forest, and saw innumerable bald patches marring the green plains of Douglas Firs. His incredulity, anger, and despair transformed into a resolve that he would plant trees in those very patches of scarred earth, and trust that the new saplings would grow never to be felled, that they would survive human deforestation. That they would survive humans.

The subterranean “big picture” from Nature

Earlier this week I attended a lecture on ecopsychology, wherein my colleague giving the lecture elucidated the ways in which trees communicate with one another about environmental threats and changes. They share defense signals, even with their competitor species.

I learned about the work of University of British Columbia biologist Suzanne Simard, whose research is apparently addressed somewhere in The Overstory beyond my current place in the book. In her TEDx Talk inspired by her research published in Nature about the communications between trees, she explains that old “mother trees” share carbon and nutrients with the younger trees in a forest, and they send extra resources to younger trees that are nutrient-poor.

“Forests are built on relationships”, Simard declares from the TED stage, claiming that complex adaptive systems such as these sophisticated communication lines are the source of resilience. These systems model mutual respect. We might wish to draw cues for human behavior from the trees, which teach that there is collective well being in the conscious sharing of information, that it is in keeping with nature to make it known when we experience stress, rather than to keep silent.

A view of the landscape at the Vedanta Temple, where the Mother trees loom large

One personal Overstory: When Nature stretched open my heart

Undoubtedly it was this recent series of insights that culminated in my experience of brightened vision of nature yesterday afternoon. I was driving, thinking about things embarrassingly petty, when I saw a large carpet of wild mustard on the hillside. My whole demeanor shifted from vaguely irritated and apathetic to gobsmacked. I could not believe how beautiful the color was. And then as I continued to drive I saw deep purple, rusty red, clean and bright green, in numerous textures and arrangements of plant life, and it all converged to overwhelm me and, like a curtain drawn open I could feel the fringes of my heart stretch wide open with a kind of love that was fulfilled and unreturned at the same time.

It reminded me of the day when, at five years old, I opened my eyes after having them closed for a week following a surgery, and I noticed first the colors that seemed to crowd in and vie for my attention. My eyes were new and all the living things of the world seemed more full of life than they had ever been.

And so yesterday I caught myself, perhaps for the second time in my life, knowing the world in a loving way first and foremost.

The bigger picture revealed to me then that nothing is beyond the domain of the heart, even the material of rational objectivity which I would otherwise ascribe to the mind. This five-minute reverie when my eyes swept along the colorful vista out my car window plunged me into a continuum of what I can only call impassioned consciousness.

Omniscience and empathy in poetic beloveds, Whitman and Tempest

Whenever I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), I watch all the people he saw in the world revolve before my mind’s eye: the farmer and the soldier and the young bride and the enslaved person and the artist and the body of the drowned man and the infant at the mother’s breast and the cat prowling back gardens. All nameless, everyday archetypes for the time. All my heart’s threshing floor, the place to harvest words and sort through meanings.

In one segment, “The Sleepers”, Whitman offers a catalogue of normally socially differentiated people whose experience of sleep endows them with a shared human experience that transcends their differing levels of privilege, age, freedom and suffering:

I swear they are all beautiful,

Every one that sleeps is beautiful, everything in the dim light is beautiful,

The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

Sleep, the blanket experience of peace and grave vulnerability, is mundane and intimate here.

My battered copy gifted by a dear friend

Kate Tempest’s poem, “Lionmouth Doorknocker” in her album Let Them Eat Chaos (2016) hands the listener off to a series of one-lined vignettes of people in the city in the daytime:

The workers watch the clocks

Fiddle with their Parker pens

While the grandmothers

Haggle with the market men

Then she plunges us into the intimate acquaintance of those few people who are awake in the depths of early morning, and are not the beautiful ones at peace, as in Whitman’s world.

It’s 04:18 AM

At this very moment, on this very street

Seven different people in seven different flats

Are wide awake, they can’t sleep

Now, of all these people, in all these houses

Only these seven are awake

And they shiver in the middle of the night

Counting their sheepish mistakes

Is anybody else awake?

Will it ever be day again?

Are these people more wretched because they are at the mercy of their thoughts, or because they cannot see that their experience is shared? Because they do not know about the networks of roots that run from tree to tree, from person to person, when we share pain and share the resources to cope? Because they do not see the big picture?

The pictures the Sleepers (don’t) see

Do the peaceful dreamers see the bigger picture of their own waking circumstances, and find peace therein?

Not here will I attempt to defend the validity of reporting dreams, and ascribing truth to them. But undeniably dreams do offer a different kind of vision, from which we create story, association, and meaning, as we do in waking life. And in the following example from my own catalogue of recent dreams, there is an aspect of seeing, or failing to see, which I feel is somehow related to the issue of perspective addressed in this blog entry: And yes, there is self-indulgence in dream-telling, but also in blog-writing and painting and playwrighting and any creative work.

I had an appointment with someone wise, and to visit this person I went up a marble staircase, which ended at a landing with corridors leading to the right and left, where stood, respectively, statues of a man in 18^th-century Anglo-American dress (long coat, buckled shoes, stockings, breeches, and a cravat) and a woman who looked like an image of Venus, with her draped clothing gathered around her hips. Her hair was loose and tumbled wildly over her shoulders and her breasts, and a snake slithered up her torso, its tail pointing down between her hip bones and its head lost somewhere in her hair. I took the path to the right, past the statue of the man, because those were the instructions I had been given. At the end of the corridor I reached an empty gallery, in what I knew to be the British Museum. A huge crowd of people was milling around, pausing at intervals to look at the bare walls, as if there were fascinating exhibits there. I could see nothing, and this terrified me. Then a harried old man in an orange suit shuffled toward me, telling me he had been waiting for me, that I must come with him. His speech was rapid and pressured, and I feared him. He was not the one I had come to meet. I ran back down the stairs and he ran after me. I got to the bottom of the staircase and he could go no further.

Somehow I cannot content myself simply to appreciate the paradox, the irresolvable complexity between the bigger picture and the small, tender lives it encapsulates. To watch myself and others, dreaming or waking, attempt to see a broader, impartial view, and come up against the occupation hazard of having a body, and immediate circumstances that intrude upon this enlightened perspective.

But I do not say this with cynicism. For me, the ecstasy of jet-setting subjectivity is endlessly fascinating.

Aquarius takes the aerial, broad, outside-of-the-box view, and at the New Moon, grand schemes are birthed out of the known metrical workings of the world. But Aquarius is also a fixed air sign. To look out from behind the eyes of the individual is not the habit of Aquarius, but Leo, its counterpoint and opposite sign, which also fixes itself in habitual perspectives.

But to integrate the poles of this opposition, and to honor the different modes of seeing oneself and the outside, to remember that big and small abide in the heart, to recognize visions, dreams, and feelings, and to understand their comings-and-goings within oneself and others, like the wind through the trees – that might be the best practice I can follow in this Lunar New Year.

Because when I read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or listen to the first track from Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos, (“Picture a Vacuum”), I know that the broad view makes my heart pummel its cage no less than does the narrow.

Reflections on the Hidden, the Hallowed, and the Harrowing of Scorpio Season

Why not rise early, when it is still dark, to read a few lines of something that cradles, calms, delights, or even perturbs you? Why not write a few lines of your own, and regale yourself with contemplative musings, the beginnings of tales that flicker like firelight in the dark cold potential of the day unbirthed, a potential that seethes unseen, like magma, a day waiting to be born under the waning light of a sun in Scorpio?

These are the questions I ask myself when I want to stay in bed a few more minutes, but know that it will be ultimately more fulfilling to begin the day with some form of movement, contemplation, shifting things around in the shadows.

Scorpio is the purveyor of things hidden, and secret, and clandestine. The wielder of latent powers that churn the depths of the earth and generate new life out of the husks of old.

Here are some recent reflections on how this theme has expressed itself to me of late.

Fall at Pacifica

Astrology’s Scorpionic Renaissance

Despite my record of astrologically themed blog posts, my interest in astrology is something I’ve been ambivalent about sharing since I first began to study it when I was about ten years old, around the same time as I discovered Greco-Roman mythology, my great love and medicine. Astrology was one of those pursuits to study in the pre-sunrise, late night, hidden hours, because I received early messages that it was at worst creepy and demonic, and at best silly and small-minded.

My friends’ mothers, my teachers’ wives, those were the ones whom I was often told were interested in astrology when I was young; all the women about whom I could say, “I know of her, but I do not know her”. Those whose names rang like reference points in my mind well before I met them, after such a long time of mutual friends ensuring that our shared, secret interests would result in an enviable intimacy.

I did meet some of these rare, astrologically-inclined people in passing. Many of them had other primary, but still complementary pursuits: tarot, metalworking, psychoanalysis, painting. And similarly for me, astrology was a longstanding interest I kept close at hand wherever I went. I studied psychological astrology in California, then moved to the UK for graduate school and took a foundational course at the London School of Astrology, a course that combined the more popular techniques of birth chart reading and forecasting with branches as old and esoteric as horary astrology (the one that allows you to find that pair of keys you lost under the floorboards of your ex-wife’s house) and as nascent as astrocartography, which casts a new birth chart for you wherever you find yourself in the world. I have studied, I have read charts for others, and very recently I published my first astrological article, a piece on the astrological evolution of MTV as a network and a cultural entity in a volume, The Book of Music Horoscopes, edited by Frank Clifford, a great mentor of mine.

: One of the first astrology books I worked with as a pre-teen…

Music and Astrology

And now things have evolved, and among young people especially there seems to be a certain expectation of a base level of astrological literacy that stretches from personality profiling to behavioral adaptation on the basis of New Moons and Mercury retrogrades. Popular attitudes toward these two elements in particular expose the very human vacillation between the belief in the capacity of the individual to harness the power of the cosmos and “find the flow” with mere intentionality (expressed by making a vision board, journaling, or shouting into the void “It will be so!”), and the belief that there is nothing to do but surrender to cosmic forces which are more powerful than we are.

A recent New York Times article acknowledged the shift toward astrology, and other pursuits in self-awareness, self-development, and self-actualization (such as various practices associated with the psychedelic renaissance) used as language to communicate human experience, and modes of self-healing. The article centers on the pressures therapists are currently encountering to become fluent in this parlance in order to witness their clients’ experiences, rather than to voice encouragement or discouragement.

The shop where I bought my first astrology books, which used to be minded by older women dressed in voluminous earth-toned draperies is now run by young people, with no apparent predominance of gender expression, whose wardrobe does not clearly read “New-Age”.

So perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, but it seems, at least in mainstream Californian culture, astrology no longer inhabits the dubious realm of the “occult”, and voicing one’s impressions of astrological phenomena is not perceived as a sinister deed, or, at its most benign, a wishy-washy practice for gullible and inconsequential minds.

Astrology seems to be doing the true Scorpionic thing of emerging, refortified and reformed out of the shadows.

Astrology is like folklore, an old, non-linear language for understanding humanness that goes in and out of fashion, but always manages to survive social pressures to go into hiding. The archetypal metaphors astrology uses offer (like folklore again) interpretations and aetiologies, points of origin for those goading questions of why, when each subsequent generation is just a bit more knowledgeable of compassion, moral behavior, environmentalism, diversity appreciation, kindness, hospitality, ingenuity, grace, and the arts of living honorably, generously, and conscientiously, we individually and collectively struggle to enact these lessons, and still manage to do ourselves and others harm sometimes.

Scorpio is in the sign of katabasis, the journey to the Underworld for a meeting with a departed mentor, a requisite part of the heroic journey. Scorpio reminds us that the greatest stories bury wisdom in the shadow realms, which for us might look like the painful recognition of shame and guilt and anger and limb-slackening grief and self-betrayal and irrationality and fear of our own irrationality.

But these aspects also help us to contextualize the gifts, the triumphs, the strengths, the redemptive potential that lies beyond the mistakes we are bound to make. The bond into which we entered when our consciousness took human form.

Adventures in Scorpionic healing with (what else?) crystal singing bowls

I went to a yoga class on the night of the New Moon in Scorpio. The class featured a sound bath of crystal singing bowls played by a teacher who invited meditations on death, grief, and regeneration of the decayed in new forms. I do not know whether it was this conceptual set-up that resulted in the following experience, or if it was the singing bowls themselves.

Prior to the sound bath our teacher led us through a slow movement practice. She spoke with a measure of conviction and spiritedness that I somehow found reminiscent of a sea captain leading an exploratory voyage. Yet, for me, there was something disturbingly opaque about where we were headed, the lessons I was supposed to be learning. The greying twilight pressing in on the windows and the rapidly cooling air had me feeling as if we were sailing through a thick fog, with only our breath and our teacher’s clear, bright voice to signal any forward movement.

Near the end of the class, after the light had faded completely, she wound her mallet around the rims of the crystal bowls, and their dull ringing struck eerie, creeping waves in the air that sought my organs and plied them with searching sonic fingers. People in the class started coughing. I could hear doors slamming in the neighboring businesses as the proprietors left. All of the sounds rang violent, far too loud and sudden, a dissonant, erratic jarring against the consistent thrumming of the bowls, whose wavelike intonations I did not quite trust.

Until my teacher sang along, in a low, rich, humming. And then my throat rapidly swelled and threatened to burst and tears filled my eyes. Suddenly I envisioned a lonely, sinuous throbbing thing, a conscious entity without eyes or nose or ears, but keenly sensate, encased in weblike, glistening strands and suspended in the dark, and it might have been my heart. It might have been my life, unseen by anyone but me. Life, simply felt, so intimately and in such solitude that it seems ugly, grotesque, and shameful, but unapologetically so.

She sang, and the beauty of her voice, blended with her crystalline companions in that preternatural harmony, struck me deeply. I found myself clinging to life, to the splendour of hearing, and feeling the sound waves seep into the subdermal parts of myself that felt as distant and as essential as the core of the earth.

I thought crystal bowl sound baths were supposed to be relaxing. But in the foggy, uncharted currents of consciousness which we sailed, our captain had asked us (in words other than the following, by which I am taxing this metaphor beyond its reasonable limits) to scatter to the grey waves the burned-out aspects of ourselves and our external circumstances we could acknowledge had died for us this year, signalling our readiness to release them into the hands of Nature, Venus Genetrix, the resourceful mistress of reformulating the dead into the living.

Crystal bowls are apparently taking the place of Tibetan metal singing bowls in yoga classes. I found a recent Yoga Journal article, wherein makers of crystal bowls claim that these bowls more effectively facilitate the penetration (a word used more than once in this article) of our bodies with sound waves because our bones have a crystalline, as opposed to a metallic structure. Thus, crystal bowls made in Colorado are more healing, more attuned to the human body, than Tibetan prayer bowls. I suspect a case of cultural supersessionism. But maybe this is merely because I could not handle the penetrative healing of the crystal bowls.

Scorpio season: Learning the art of living

Indeed, Scorpio season is a good time to pause in our onward striving, all our work toward future manifestation, to acknowledge the opacity of loss, in terms of the unknown changes it will bring, and the questions, grief, and anxieties it conjures and will never satisfy. The uncanny ways in which loss points to life, goads us with a kind of urgency to live, to attend the wake after the burial.

A year ago I went to a women’s ceremony in celebration of Samhain, the new year in the Celtic tradition, also the time when (as in many other traditions) the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, when we pause to consider the fragility, but the insistent vigor of life as we light candles in the darkness for Samhain, for Día de los Muertos, for Diwali. In a meditation exercise in this ceremony we were invited to consider how we would live if we knew we only has six months. One month. One week.

When the dead leaves seek the earth, it is natural, I suppose, to contemplate these things, to find a space to sit with them in community, to honor their weight without bearing it alone, to find compassion for the uncomfortable, inconsolable depths within us all, to tell stories in the dark that can be cauldrons for all the stewing passions, griefs, and wiles that are big and timeless, and paradoxically, can reside in one body, in one heart.

And to speak in the language of astrology, which continues to rise out of the depths of the “occult”…

At this time of year, I have been rising early, when it is still dark, to move, to feel my muscles stretch and strive and ache, to feel my lungs expand, my toes flatten themselves against the floor, in honor of those who cannot rise in their bodies anymore. To read and to write a little, to delight in my ability to experience thought, mere consciousness, abilities that we have for such precious time as we live.

But in the interest of emotional equilibrium maybe I’ll give the crystal bowls a decent berth…

Good questions for Scorpio season:

What inner processes of transformation am I undergoing?
This year, what has come to a natural, or an unnatural close? Can I bear compassionate witness to my experience of this loss, in my body, and in my heart?
What sources of wisdom have I encountered in the midst of the toughest challenges I have faced in the past year?
Where does my way feel constricted, my view occluded? Can I wait out the uncertainty until the shadows start to shift and some truth, previously unnoticed, is revealed?
How can I honor my ancestors? What qualities do I see in them, and in their stories that inspire me deeply?
How might I conduct myself differently when I envision myself as an ancestor, a forerunner of future lives?

And on a slightly lighter level…

What are my favorite folktales, myths, or scary stories to tell in the autumnal season? What aspects of them speak to my experience?

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One of my favorites was always The Ghost-Eye Tree, by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault, a children’s book whose premise involves a brother and a sister traveling on a last-minute errand to fetch milk for their mother. They must walk to the dairy farmer after dark, and halfway along the road they must pass an old, said-to-be-haunted oak tree, called the Ghost-Eye Tree. The boy narrator of the book tells his reader,

“One dark and windy autumn night when the sun had long gone down, Mama asked my sister and me to take the road to the end of the town to get a bucket of milk. Oooo . . . I dreaded to go . . . I dreaded the tree . . . Why does Mama always choose me when the night is so dark and the mind runs free?”

I love the story because the tree must be suffered, halfway along the path to light and safety, on the way there and back. The boy has a talisman, a hat, which he wears to make him look tough (to himself, really), until the wind takes it and his sister has to run back to find it on the “haunted ground” at the foot of the Ghost Eye Tree. She survives the solo trip for the hat, and chastises her brother for his fearfulness.

When the night is so dark and the mind runs free…

Reminds me of when I was a kid and feared the darkness. I would fall asleep listening to the radio, my talisman of sorts, because I felt comforted by the live broadcast, the knowledge that a DJ was awake and at work, and whose presence over the radio waves could somehow ward off the absorption of the darkness that scared me so much.

I love tales that draw attention to the fearsome stories our minds fashion, stories that illuminate the fragility of the monsters as well as the talismans that ward them off.

Lots to harvest and to steep in contemplative silence this time of year.

Thanks for reading, witnessing, and thinking.

A few weeks ago I took a photo at the last Full Moon (in Aries) of an autumnal, Ghost-Eye Tree lookalike in my neighborhood.

The Call to Home: Reflections on the New Moon in Cancer this Independence Day

This New Moon in Cancer calls us home.

The first time I travelled to the UK, as a 16-year-old in 2004, it was the 4^th of July. Tickets were cheap for that date, as many travellers anticipated another attack, a follow-up to 9/11 on a date significant to Americans, and generally avoided flying to or from the US on Independence Day. I do not remember harboring a tremendous amount of anxiety about this; rather, a secret amusement surrounding the irony that I was spending the anniversary of American independence travelling to the nation from which our ancestors had fought so hard to secure autonomous statehood.

Little did I know that in fewer than ten years following this initial trip I would come to the UK for graduate school and call this country my home for 7+ years.

The New Moon in Cancer is born out of the womb of itself, as the Moon is Cancer’s ruling planet. This year, if you happened to be in the South Pacific or parts of South America, you might have seen the New Moon, usually invisible at this stage in its cycle due to its proximity to the sun from our vantage point, directly pass over the sun in a solar eclipse.

This New Moon in eclipse will not be invisible. It will not be ignored. It calls you home, to revisit that place, that community, or that internal set of circumstances that allow you to feel safe, nurtured, valued, rejuvenated, and connected to the ancestors, the roots of your being. To honor the wisdom of your body, the most immediate physical home that contains you.

Whenever I am not feeling very much at home in my external circumstances, I come back to my yoga practice, my mindfulness practice, the practices of dance and song and braiding my hair and walking outside to feel the grass underfoot, the mindful practices of inhabiting my body.

I went back to my hometown in California to do my first 200-hour yoga teacher training, around the time when the New Moon was in Capricorn and it was time for conscious goal-setting, for dedicating myself to the climb, placing myself at the mercy of the rocky wilderness to achieve a goal, the procurement of a qualification of teaching in yoga, in movement that I can use in my working life. And boy, was the trail rocky at times. I found splendour and calm. I found the wickedest parts of myself. I found the teachers I needed. I trusted and mistrusted them and trusted and mistrusted myself time and time again, and vacillated between meekness and assertiveness, and defended some of my crude, uncharitable ways of perceiving myself and others with brutal, unpitying rationality. And then I would release these convictions and breathe into parts of my body from which I had dissociated, and I allowed the problems in my mind, all the contradictions in myself and in the teachings I had been trying to resolve to unstick themselves.

By the end of the training I felt a burgeoning strength within myself, a vigor that I had not felt in years. I felt like I had a place in the community, both at the studio and among friends and family old and new, a place as an adult in the city of my birth. I did home improvement work on the house I grew up in. I resumed my lectureship at the university where I had completed my undergraduate degree, working alongside my former teachers as a colleague. I taught yoga to the graduate students in the department. I supported my mom’s recovery from major surgery. I felt like I was of service from start to finish, within and beyond the training. It felt right and providential.

It felt Hesiodic, like the life of the proverbial farmer in the 8^th/7^th-century BCE Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days, the farmer who knows the people with whom he shares his village and knows his place within it. It felt like the full spectrum of my humanity could find itself reflected in the experiences of that city and the people and the ocean and the hillsides that I had seen in the past year undergo death and devastation, literal fires and floods, and emerge resilient and self-sustaining. This is the place where I could live and die and decompose and come back as wild mustard.

Bindweed: The roots of ourselves, the roots of our stories

When I returned to the UK, my affect shifted into uncertainty and rootlessness, as the voice of self-talk that I had just taught to draw its material from a deep well of insight began to stammer, and a psychic fog settled in.

But when I do embodied meditations, and when I write, it begins to clear.

This is the place where I have lived, loved, learned, tried and tested myself, met rejection upon rejection and still struck gold, until I didn’t, and then I decided to write a book on women in Greek tragedy, and found that in their company I could no longer hold myself in the combined shape of measured cleverness, poise, and the caricature of Californian hippie sensibilities I had learned to manifest because it was wishy-washy, non-threatening, and cute.

But the tales of tragic women, all their transgressive, violent acts of desperation to reclaim their agency in their lives fly with leathery, infernal wings in the face of cuteness. They demand our awakening to the diminished parts of ourselves that need to be witnessed and integrated, given a voice early enough so that they can use their powers for healing rather than destruction. The tragic women demand you look at the things hiding in the shadows you cast over them. All the stuff that looms bigger the longer it’s left alone.

In the yoga teacher training, it was taken for granted that we had all been relegating tender parts of ourselves to the shadows, had created a hulking repository of psychic stuff. My stuff just intermingled with everyone else’s stuff, and we could grieve and laugh, or do a movement practice and jostle these awkward pieces around inside our bodies that were gracious enough to hold them without judgement. I felt that I could begin to illuminate this stuff, untangle it, make friends with it. I started to talk about this process, and how the tragic women for me, and perhaps for others are the knowers and the keepers of the stuff, and people listened.

Then I went back to the UK, and I stopped talking, because I felt for the container and couldn’t find it. Instead I got caught up with visions of stunted growing things, exposed roots with remnants of dark earth beginning to dry up around them. The day after I returned to Oxford, I was walking into Christ Church Meadows and several people passing commented on the state of an old willow tree. “That willow makes me so sad. Why did they do that to it?” “I know, couldn’t they have left it alone?” And another, wielding typical British sarcasm, “Well, one of the College dons has a better view now – that’s what’s important”.

I looked around to view the willow, a quiet witness of those passing from the street into the Meadows. Its upper branches had been cut. I cried, as I did later when my husband began to uproot the ivy in the back garden. I asked him what he wanted to grow instead, and he said, “Wildflowers”. I stayed my mind that chomped at the bit to weave interpretations of the prospect of replacing Dionysus’ plant with those the maiden Persephone was picking before the earth opened up and Death abducted her to be his bride.

We live in a world of meanings and projections, some of which are helpful and some not-so-helpful.

The willow may well have needed cutting due to disease, or circumstances other than the dons’ wishes for a wider view of the meadows. And as my googling has revealed, my husband’s instincts were in keeping with most gardeners’ approaches to what grows in our back garden: not ivy, but bindweed, a form of morning glory that according to the Royal Horticulture Society (“Inspiring everyone to grow”), “Twine[s] around other plant stems, smothering them in the process…These weeds are difficult to eradicate by cultural methods as their roots can extend deep into the soil”. Although the website says that the society does not endorse chemical methods of weed-killing, they tell you exactly how to use chemical weed-killers to get rid of bindweed. Not inspiring everyone to grow, then…

Those like me who have a tendency to see the world as a kind of Joseph Campbellesque jungle of story themes and archetypal encounters can catch ourselves in the bindweed of one interpretation that smothers all other readings of a situation. Yet sometimes we receive the guidance, the message we need to hear from these old stories, which have an eerie way of foretelling the cycles of behavior, relationship, and belief we hurtle through over and over again, often unconsciously. We can find truth and liberation in the telling, as well as falsity, just as our friend Hesiod insinuated at the beginning of his Theogony, his account of the genealogy of the gods.

The Muses can tell lies as well as the truth.

So, if we can avoid determinism and look to the New Moon in Cancer as a general thematic inspiration for contemplation of home and what it means for us, we can unleash innumerable, often contradictory associations, all of which strike us hard in the breast. They strike hard and close because they remind us of how we have lived the seasons of our lives and tended to the physical and emotional ground that sustains us.

For example…

Twin Homes: My associations with the New Moon

Before I left California to study at Oxford, back in 2011, I attended a seminar on world astrology with the great Rick Tarnas, and was experiencing the intensity of Pluto in Capricorn crossing over my Saturn/Uranus conjunction, a “vice-grip” (in Rick’s words) of urgent necessity to craft new institutional and cultural structures out of the remains of old, obsolete ones – something everyone born within a couple of years of me was undergoing. I told Rick of the feeling of scarcity (and its reflection in the wake of the Great Recession) that attended this transit through Capricorn, the sign that teaches us the art of resourcefulness, and that it reminded me of Hesiod’s insistence in his Works and Days that the resourcelessness, the amechanie (ἀμηχανίη) (WD, 496) be the farmer’s great teacher in the winter season, the season that is the proof of the efficacy of planning, sowing the seeds, harvesting the crops, storing them away, and shoring up one’s house against the elements.

And now Pluto, still in Capricorn, has passed in opposition over my Moon in Cancer, and propelled me into an arena of self-discovery and reconciliation of internal opposites, inconsistencies, and divisions that fostered me to draw from my well of emotional resources rather than rely on outside influences. And Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn is now opposing the Moon for the remainder of 2019. A call for buttoning down the hatches and waiting out the winter. A call for taking inventory of what I have stored away. A wintry chill in the heat of summer. A need for reckoning, acknowledgement of the consequences of my tendency to plant the seeds on one side of the ocean, and not come back in time to harvest them. The fruit ripened, dropped, and rotted away on the ground, and if I was lucky I could pluck the late ones. The consequences of splitting my energy between continents, of shadow side of the privilege of two beautiful, fulfilling places to call home.

Twin homes, two lives in two places. You can’t ride two horses with one hiny, as my mother would say.

And now for your example…

New Moon in Cancer: An exercise

So what is calling you home? How can you be fed and nurtured? How can you feed and nurture others? If your mind (thinking brain, pre-frontal cortex) is the first one to catapult ideas and stories into your consciousness, see if you can let that run its course before asking for other embodied perspectives in the following meditation.

One of the most valuable tools I learned in the teacher training was that significant wisdom lies in the solar-plexus, the “gut-brain”, containing over 100 million nerve cells. Known widely in popular culture as the seat of intuition and willpower, the scientific community (at Johns Hopkins medicine at least) acknowledges the gut’s significant capacity for intelligence, although the types of intelligence and mechanisms for delivering them are largely unknown and unstudied.

But in meditation practices working with the chakras (energy centers, associated with the Tantric branch of yogic philosophy) that are linked to areas of the body, and certainly in disciplines such as craniosacral therapy, you can look to your gut as well as other body parts, including the heart space, pelvis, throat, hip creases, and bones as places of knowing, and they have their own stories to tell.

But for this exercise I invite you to look to the gut and the heart space, parts of the body close to those associated with the sign of Cancer in the western zodiac,[1] as places of insight into the question, What is calling me home?

Find a quiet space and a comfortable seat, where you can settle your sitting bones into the ground or a chair and you can extend your spine and the crown of your head toward the sky, stacking each vertebra on top of the one below.
Observe the natural flow of your breath, without altering it, just to arrive. Observe your mental and emotional landscape, as you would observe clouds crossing over the sky, without trying to change them. Maintain this gentle observation for 10 breaths.
Breathe into your belly, from the lower abdomen through the solar plexus. You can place your hands on your belly, side ribs, or lower back and feel the breath travel freely through these areas, drawing your awareness further inwards so that you can begin to hear the whispers of this wisdom region. What is calling me home? How can I be fed and nurtured? How can I feed and nurture others?
Now breathe into your heart space, your upper chest, placing your fingers at your collarbones and feeling your hands rise and fall with the breath. What is calling me home? How can I be fed and nurtured? How can I feed and nurture others?
Be patient and receptive, keep breathing, and wait for the answers to come. Be gentle with yourself, and drop the practice if it feels physically or emotionally untenable or overwhelming.
Write down the responses you get. Compare them. Be amazed, grateful, curious, underwhelmed, sad, anxious, inspired, angry – can you allow whatever emotions attend this exercise to be?
Then put what you have written aside, take a walk, feel the ground under your feet, listen to the soundscape that surrounds you, to integrate the knowledge gained. And thank all of yourself for navigating some of these hidden, labyrinthine paths to inner guidance.

Remember that this exercise in itself is a form of homecoming.

Or, a suspension of the gripping of the bindweed of interpretations in which we might find ourselves caught through reliance on one knowledge center for guidance.

Or even (pardon the tenuous link here) a “declaration of independence” from the influence of narratives that no longer serve.

Wherever you are called home, near or far, let the knowledge of it serve you well today and this month!

[1] The breasts, pectoral muscles, stomach, and womb are associated with Cancer.