Virgo New Moon 2017

Another New Moon. More letting go. More releasing what no longer serves. That's what New Moon energy is for.

This New Moon continues the changes begun with the solar eclipse. Since eclipses begin six month goal cycles, each new moon within that time defines a new developmental phase for long-term goals. The solar eclipse in August started the path of bold, confident changes for positive growth and happiness. Since this New Moon is opposite Chiron, adjustments must be made in how to attain the goals in response to the deepest and most painful personal wounds.

Although it may feel easier to make a completely new start, that kind of extreme change is tougher on friends, partners, family and other loved ones. Finances need to be considered in the midst of these shifts as well. It's the old adage of don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Be careful not to cause total chaos. It's important to focus on the big picture as well as personal desire. There is always the possibility for adventure and personal growth in education, travel, new relationships or other opportunities while continuing core responsibilities.

Be awake to and aware of the ripple effect of each act. What is said or done creates small, overlapping moves that touch others. One person cannot counter the effects of areas ravaged by hurricanes, floods, wildfires or earthquakes. But one gesture of care and healing can influence others and combine with the gestures of others to make a difference.

Since the energy of this New Moon is Virgo, it's about healing every aspect of being ~ mind, body and soul. Virgo is about self-focus as well as other focus. This presents an opportunity for burnout if we balance too far one way or the other. The capacity to nurse and heal wounds is strong in Virgo's energy, especially if used thoughtfully.

There's much in this New Moon that is focused on problem-solving: Venus, Mars, Mercury, the Sun and the Moon are all in Virgo. There's no way to avoid the strong pull of cleaning up everything. A good time to focus on a project, for work, pleasure or home.

What healing do you need? What is the wound that is surfacing right now? What is the most loving thing you can do for yourself? What are you hooked on? What can you release and give up? How can you best move forward toward achieving the goals you set during the solar eclipse? How can your positive gestures make a difference? How can your thoughtless gestures create chaos? Which will you consciously or unconsciously choose?

July 2016 Capricorn Full Moon

One theme of July's Full Moon is letting go. Letting go what no longer serves us. Letting go the past. Letting go regrets. Letting go the tight controls we put on our emotions. Another word for all of this might be surrender. It's not a passive release. It's an active process of allowing for experience, expression and exhalation.

Allow the experience of remembering and considering what is holding us back from being or doing our best. Allow the expression of regret, grief, fear or whatever other emotions bubble up. Allow the exhalation of pent-up breath, tears, exhaustion and worry. The Capricorn Full Moon is present to support us as we dig deep into our very selves, call up our shadows and bear our souls.

Uranus, the Ultimate Awakener, and Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, are square to the Full Moon as well helping to shake the foundations to cause destruction of the old and rebuilding of something new and better. This is the time to rebalance and refocus on our higher path, realign our earthly self with our heavenly self, bring the ideal into reality.

What do you need to let go of? What no longer serves your best good? What feeling/s are cramped inside you, waiting to be released? How will you move forward from here? How will you embrace the healing and joining of your earthly self and your heavenly one?

New Moon in Gemini and Grand Cross

New Moons are always about letting go, change and transformation. This one in particular, intimately connected with the mutable Grand Cross, is about changing direction, changing perception, changing affection.... releasing anything, any little thing, inhibiting our deeper, truer Selves from showing up.

This New Moon, as it squares Jupiter, Neptune and the Nodes and opposes Saturn, lights our way to discerning the truth in our life and making decisions to release the past so the new can show up for us. We must relish our own self-love in order to express our love for others in the best possible way. We have to learn and experience and practice how to do things differently, to create new pathways in our very being leading toward that creation and creativity. We benefit from remembering our power is in embracing Mystery and Unknowing in order to shift our reality and create change by unlocking the alchemy of surrender. This New Moon also celebrates the facets of the Divine Feminine: instincts of the Moon, physicality of Venus, resistance of Lilith.

Because this New Moon is also activating many planetary energies, there is potent and potential energy in this New Moon, preparing us to consider the seeds we want to plant for the future. This is something we should take seriously ~ or find ourselves stuck in the patterns of the past. All the recent retrograde energy we've been rolling through (see my post on the Full Moon in Sagittarius and Other Wonders) has aided us in stirring up the past in order to release it. Gemini is all about communication and the throat chakra to express our truth and feelings and call forth what we truly want.

As we look for what has been cleared and released from our lives during all the retrograde cycles, the golden opportunity of this New Moon is to notice the cracks and seek clarity on how to proceed. Our actions and energies, current to the next eclipse season starting in September. will shape what is to come. As we clarify and set our intentions, in writing preferably, it would be wise for us to remember that when one door closes, another opens.

What are your intentions for the future? What are you willing to release? What do you wish to call forth? What do you wish to manifest? How will you speak your wishes? How will your intentions affect those around you? To whom will you speak your intentions?

January's Super New Moon

January 20, 2015 ~ The first New Moon of the new year AND the first SuperMoon of 2015. Unusual as it may seem, this New Moon is one of the closest to the Earth. Even though we don't see it, we can feel the pull of its presence.

This Super New Moon is in Aquarius, the sign of new beginnings, fresh starts and expecting the unexpected.

The New Moon is always a time of letting go. However, this one demands that you look closely within to see what needs changing in order to create success and growth. Look at your challenges in a new way and be willing to embrace them, to work with them, to overcome them.

There is power in the choices you make today. Choose well. Let the Super New Moon work its magic to help you create new life and co-create it the way you want it to be. Live your creativity from the deepest part of yourself. Empower yourself ~ do what makes you feel powerful, courageous, strong. Step out of your comfort zone and be bold and innovative. Listen to your inner knowing, your intuition. Pay attention. Listen with all your attention.

New Moons carry their own power. The particular potential of this one is its position as the first of the year.

What are you ready to let go of? How is you creative energy calling to you? What is your intuition saying?

Snake's Gift

I walked out my front door the other day to find Snake had left a gift on my rather small concrete stoop. Although it was a simple garden-variety snake, I was awe-struck seeing the skin sitting there. In the 20+ years I've lived in this house, this has never occurred before.

Snake is about transformation and transmutation ~ life, death, rebirth. All in all, it's about change. The coming year promises to be one of change, of letting go of old ways, of rebirth.

Snake sloughs off it skin as it grows. It sheds and leaves behind what no longer serves, what no longer fits, what has become limiting.

Finding Snake's skin reminds me to let go of what no longer serves my soul's purpose. It's not about berating myself for having the skin to shed in the first place. Sometimes what I've come to rely on, to take for granted, to expect, is fitting too tightly. I need to be willing to shed and to leave behind what I find myself clinging to with the most rigid force. The skin is going to split, I'm outgrowing what it is holding in. Like Snake, I need to trust the instinct that leads me forward to the place where I have room to grow into the transformed and transmutated person I am becoming.

What animal has left gifts for you recently? What do you need to give up, pass on, let go? What other gifts come to you from what the animal world? How do you find the time and energy to work out those gifts?

Life Awaits

Speaking with a friend recently, I referenced Joseph Campbell and the many ideas I learned reading and listening to him. This quote came to mind since it fits the current theme of my life.

I planned different tracks for my life over the years: where I would live, where I would teach, what and who I would teach, where I would travel, who I would be with (in every different sense of that phrase), how long I would be somewhere, how long I would do something.... I could go on and on.

Yet each time something new showed up and I shifted from my plan to what was waiting for me, I discovered a renewal that left me nothing but grateful. Maybe not at first, but when I stepped out of the way, breathed into the change and relaxed, it was beautiful.

It's the last line of this quote that brings out my grin. I don't know that I looked at the changes as shedding skin, but that certainly fits. My thoughts went more to the adage about the seed needing to die in the earth in order for the plant to grow. Both metaphors work. Beauty and renewal arrive when I let go of what no longer serves or suits me.

What skins have you shed? As the seasons change, what needs to change within you? How do you open yourself to the process of letting go?

Freedom

Wisdom of the House of Night, Colette Baron Reid

Letting go. What a wonderful image of all the flying things ~ butterflies, moths, dragonflies ~ as they rise from what could be captivity. Yet letting go doesn't apply only to things with wings. Ha! Much of the time for me it applies to emotions and concepts even more than to people ~ or butterflies.

There's a saying: If you love something set it free. Letting go applies to those we love as well as to the thoughts and fears we bear within us. This image is a reminder that freedom itself is important.

What happens when I let go of the concepts I have about others? That frees me to be able to see them as they truly are ~ in that moment. What I need to remember is that it frees me. Other people aren't bound by my concepts, I am. They usually don't know, or perhaps even care, what I think.

What happens when I let go of my notions of myself? my own descriptions of who I am? or of who I am not? I free myself to express facets that I may not have expressed before. I can care or love or act in whatever manner is most genuine in that moment.

What happens when I simply let go? when I breathe deeply and release all the fear, anxiety and grief? when I recognize that everyone in my life is his or her own person? I sleep better. My shoulders go down. I laugh more. Energy and love fill me. Letting go improves my life.

What about you? What do you carry around that would be better let go? How does freedom feel to you? Who and/or what benefits the most from your letting go?

Facing Midnight

©2014 by ML Monroe

A Clear Midnight

by Walt Whitman

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee full forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.




Sometimes I face midnight still wrapped in the book I'm reading or the blog I'm writing or writing/reading/learning social media or preparing for the next day. It's not the same approach as Walt Whitman describes. I love the concept of having that time for "free flight into the wordless." What does that even mean in today's connected electricity-bound culture? How can there be such a time as "wordless"?

My soul resonates with that concept. With letting go of all the hustle and bustle of the day. Really letting go. Being silent. That's not only being quiet. Silence is deeper. It permeates every aspect of my senses ~ it's a broader quieting, one that doesn't simply refer to a stilling of the noise. It goes beyond that, to a stillness of my entire being beginning at the center and expanding more fully.

Those themes Whitman mentions strike chords within me too. Night, the moon and the stars are all beloved by me. I am a creature drawn by and into the night. Yet until I read his poem, I never considered death a theme walking alongside the others. As the moon and the stars and the deep darkness of night continue to wane and wax and wane again, I will bring that theme out of its hiding place within me so it may stroll beside me instead. I will see what death has to say.

How do you interact with Whitman's themes? Are you a creature of the night? or do you prefer the light of day? What themes would be more suitable for daylight? What themes draw you?

Monday #1

With my focus right now veing the practice of Lent, I find myself pulling wisps of wisdom from a variety of sources. For those who really know me, this is how I operate in the world. By this time in my life I've learned that almost everything is connected in some previously unknown way to everything else.

Today was an active, beautiful day. I found myself at peace with my surroundings while getting frustrated with at least one person. What frustrated me was the feeling of not being heard ~ or more specifically, not having my email read thoroughly ~ before getting upbraided. My first reaction was to feel angry.... "Who does...?" and "I already said..." and "What the...?" Fortunately, it was an email format. So I didn't respond. Well, I started to, but deleted what I wrote, knowing it was the exact wrong thing to do. I breathed and let it go. Besides, I was too busy with everything else to pay much attention to it.

Why is acknowledging that incident so important to me? Because I learned something about myself from it. I learned that I can be petty and that I can get angry over little things. Yes, I knew those things about myself. Every time I recognize and acknowledge doing those things or acting in those manners, I come closer to letting go of those behaviors. I don't have to dwell on them or put myself down for having them. Just notice ... and let go.

What actions or feelings or attitudes have you noticed in yourself? Are they helpful? How are you letting go?

Latest Lesson in Motherhood

Time of Departure from US: 10:25 a.m. Tuesday
Arrival Airport: London Heathrow Airport
Time of Arrival: 11:40 a.m. Wednesday
Transportation to International Hall, University of London, from Airport: Staying with a family friend and taking the Tube on Thursday
Departure Back to US: 7:50 a.m. Tuesday (5 weeks later)
Time of Arrival Back in US: 6:01 p.m. Tuesday
Travel to Other Countries AFTER Program: Yes, Latvia and Poland

One of the most difficult lessons of motherhood is letting go. From the first step to the first day of school to the first overnight away to the first solo drive in the car to going away to college, motherhood is a series of deeper and more significant moments of letting go.

My 'little one', a 20-year-old college senior, is off to study abroad for a month and spend a week with a friend in Latvia and Poland. Traveling solo. Another first. There have been previous out-of-country trips, but always planned and guided by others. *sigh* I am so incredibly proud AND still learning to let go.

Do you remember your first long distance trip solo? What happened? How was the adventure for you? Parents: How do, did or will you handle your child's first trip a long distance away?