Through a dark night to a new dawn
Remember the Light you are
Kia Ora, Hello friend.
Thank you for meeting me here on this new moon. I’m sending this to you on the New Moon exact – when the moon and sun are conjunct, and for three days and three nights they are said to be lovers… the moon hidden away from us by the bright radiance of her lover Sun. And thank you, too, to those new readers here. Your fierce and gentle readership means so much to me.
From now on, I’m going to call these newsletters LoveLetters. And you will be able to find them on my website as an archive from Tuesday October 21st. Why LoveLetters? Because they come with all my love during these turbulent times. Times, like the astrology of now – a new moon in the sign of the scales of Libra – when our world, our lives and our livelihoods seem, perilously, to hang in the balance. They are LoveLetters, too, because I believe the world is full of Love – even in the darkest times. And that dawn is, as my dear friend Helen says, “a brand new day” – with love “letters dropped from God” right beneath our feet. This is the “speaking world” of Nature and Creature that our Ancestors knew. It is communicating with us, and is all around us, if we are deeply present, here and now. I deeply believe, in fact I know, that all of the Cosmos – and Nature Herself – want to help us through this dark night to a new dawn.
Dark Moon Sunrise over Mount Morrison – showing the sun in Libra, with Corvus, the constellation of the Crow above the Eastern horizon, Wairarapa, New Zealand, 16th October 2020
New Moon in Libra, exact at 8.31am NZDT, Saturday 17th October
It’s time for us to decide, for we hold the Earth in our hands. A new moon in Libra signals a future still lying in the balance on this Election Day, here in New Zealand. Let’s each one of us here stand in our true power, exercising our right to vote, and holding the highest intention for the best possible outcome for each other, our First Light Land and this “gay, great, happening illimitable earth”. Let’s keep moving towards the Returning Light, with the Soma of Sun and Moon healing and greening a regenerating World. May Libra’s scales of Justice – the Goddess holds them in her hands – offer both equality for all, and the reparation for any inequality shown to those have been unjustly treated. I also hold this intention for the upcoming U.S. elections in November.
Virginia Rosenberg, one of my favourite and most lyrically poetic of all astrologers, writes of this new moon:
The most intense Moon of the year. A huge ignition that requires a death and rebirth. Who are we, really? And what are we doing to prove it? How is the world a reflection of our own journey towards deep integrity and harmony?
So, this moon for me is a call to account, and a call to action. A powerful day for an election. If you’re drawn to read more about this new moon, and the Mercury Retrograde we are also currently in, you can trust Virginia to see the truth in your stars – in the planets, the luminaries, and the heavens at the moment you were born, and the moment we are now in.
I’ll offer these astrological distillations of the “ripple effects” of each new moon and full moon from now on, because I believe that we live in a holographic universe. As above, so below, an ancient maxim, has described this Correspondence for millennia. I believe that the constellations our ancestors named, and our movement – our dance – through them and with them to the music of the spheres, as we move around the sun, activates archetypal resonances within us. Astrology was our Ancestors’ science and their way of describing how and why certain events happened at certain times of the year. Libra, the scales, was the time of the year where crops were bundled and weighed, and harvests were bought and sold, then stored for the upcoming winter. The storytelling of Astrology is a traditional ways of knowing, that I still honour, for it shows us that we are all interconnected – infinitesimal cell to bright star in an infinite cosmos.
Entering the Pure Land
Sometimes I will do a formal meditation – Thich Nhat Hanh has led me to The Pure Land on the breath many, many mornings. He has said, “If we want to enter Heaven on Earth, we need only one conscious step and one conscious breath.” This gives me hope for each moment I forget, yet can begin again to be fully here, on the inbreath and outbreath, hear now. Sometimes I will chant the Gayatri Mantra (again silently) with Deva Premal and Miten, feeling the ancient Sanskrit hum its course through my body, connecting me to the Source, illuminating a joyful presence. Sometimes I will just listen and breathe. And in this quiet attentiveness to the fullness of Life, I open up what Spiritual Teacher Thomas Hübl would call a window of listening. Here I can hear the Voice of my Soul.
These practices are all done within 15 minutes of my waking. They are not hard. They are my Sacred to-be list. They help me be and become more of Who I Am. When I do them, I know what 13th Century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi says is true. I wake up awake. I don’t fall back to sleep, either then… or during the day. The day becomes, by way of this beginning, more mindful. More heartful. More sacred. More secret. More revealed.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,
Don’t go back to sleep…
At Sunrise, I recite another short prayer called the Holy Incantation of Solace, with accompanying mudras – sacred hand gestures. I learned this from Richard Rudd, another of my teachers. I stand barefoot and hands held out for all of us, interbeing. It takes only a few minutes. And then I say another of his to Our Lady – our Divine Mother come to dwell in the Earth.
A Pause between Breaths
I promised I’d share some more of my daily rituals. Here are two. The first ritual of the day, after the waking prayers and yoga, and the purple porridge breakfast that I told you about last time, is the nine o’clock call to pause and breathe. This call – the set alarm on my phone to the Guru Brahma mantra sung by Deva Premal and Miten I mentioned in my first LoveLetter – is my way of moving into my working day with an intentional sense of crossing a threshold, with a conscious pause for breath. A reorienting.
Because I work at home, it’s easy for time to slide. This alarm call is like my 9am bus. I need to catch it to get to work on time, even if it’s just crossing the room of our tiny house in the trees. If I miss it, and I have done so regularly, I feel like the White Rabbit… never quite catching up, anxious and hasty, not paying attention… Ask my friend Tink and she will happily (thankfully) attest to the fact that there is normal time, and there is “Stefania time”… and a lot of the time they don’t align. I am so glad for her patience and her recent timekeeping. So, you see, this alarm keeps me honest. It also does something magic, if I pause between the deep inbreath and slow outbreath, and if I am paying soft attention to it all…
Michael Meade, of Mosaic Voices, is “a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology.” He describes so eloquently what the power of this pause is, can be, and what it can do for us. If we really wish to still down to the moment, to consciously and reverently change from one state to another, or, when we want to intentionally cross a threshold – in my case at 9am, from Waking to Working – then we can use the pause of sweet nothingness at the beginning and end of each breath to help us get there.
Michael, in this passage below, is talking about Equinox, the threshold we have just passed on September 21st-22nd.
The ancient Celts divided the year into the light half and the dark half and, surprisingly, the dark half of the year was the more inspired time. Since eternal darkness preceded creation, the dark of the year could be a time of great imagination and creativity. In addition, they considered that there was a little gap between the ending of one half of the year and the beginning of the opposite half. In the slight gap between things, the eternal enters this world and stimulates the process of renewal.
The same little gap in time was seen to occur between the dark of night and the light of day and, importantly for us, the same subtle space appears between inhaling and exhaling as we each participate in the breathing of life on earth.
On one level, it is valuable to know that as the dark time of the year approaches there is a little space that involves the touch of the eternal. At an individual level, it is especially important to imagine that each breath we take not only sustains our life, but also connects us to the gap through which the eternal passes through us, just as it moves through the world and keeps creation ongoing.
So each time I pause for a breath, I give myself a chance to let the eternal enter the world… we can open up a new spaciousness around how to proceed with the next moment, rather than just hurtling along on autopilot. If you want to learn more about this sacred pause and how, at this time in our collective his and herstory, it is so essential and transformative, you can find more of Michael’s explanation here. I also sometimes say a simple prayer to help me be mindful of every single moment’s pulse and pause and pivot of air through my lungs. This prayer comes from Patricia Cota-Robles, who simply suggests – especially in the time of Covid – that we pause and say,
I am inbreathing God’s Pure Source Oxygen
(as you breathe in)I am assimilating God’s Pure Source Oxygen
(as you hold at the top of your breath)I am expanding God’s Pure Source Oxygen
(as you breathe out)I am projecting God’s Pure Source Oxygen
(as you pause at the end of a full exhale)
Please note, Gentle Reader, that you could substitute Nature’s or Earth’s or Trees’ for God’s. Whatever you conceive the Loving Infinity that holds us to be.
It’s also time for me to pause…
I want to respect your time with these LoveLetters. Please tell me whether they are too short, too long… too dense, too light. Again, let me say that I’d love this to be a dialogue, a conversation between you and me, Dear Reader. I imagine you and I sitting down at my kitchen table, which is where I also mentor clients who decide to come and explore their Ninth Gem. Before I begin a session, or begin one of these LoveLetters, I light a candle, take a breath or three, and only then begin. In person, we’d have a chat over a cup of tea and some delicious thing, and I’d offer you my kitchen table wisdom born from experience, and some pearls I have collected along my way. In a LoveLetter like this, I desire to do the same… and so, as always, I eagerly await your response.
Aroha Nui, Much Love,
In my next newsletter
In my full moon newsletter on Halloween, I will continue sharing how I move and breathe through my day. The rituals of working and walking and watching and Shaktidancing. If you’re intrigued about what Shaktidancing is, stay tuned. A clue… it’s a strangely wonderful way of grooving on down the road, finding your own tune, while also pausing for breath between songs.