From Ashes to Flowers: A Full Moon in Libra

Since the New Moon in Aries, I've been contemplating more messages from the fire, namely, ashes. 

When you have a wood fire, you have a lot of ashes. I've been asking myself, can I compost them? Can I put them on the garden? Can I use them to make soap? What can I possibly do with so many? 

And when will the fire burning season come to a close and when will I be able to put my bare feet on the ground again? I did once so far this year, at the Equinox. We had a fire and released and sowed intentions for the astrological new year. We danced for Spring! Then yesterday and today, wind and snow. And tomorrow it will be 60 degrees again. Spring in Vermont!

Tonight, a walk home in the moonlight, the woods glinting back to me the stars and the frozen mud ice. The trees on my walk hold me like old friends. They warmed me all winter and comfort me on my pensive stroll in the dark or my romp through the woods. I recognize the ones I know. They don't mind transformation, from green to bare and grey to wood to fire to smoke. 

And still, ashes. To ashes. The trees don't mind becoming ashes. They have been teaching me about the ways that I recycle myself. My Aries independence wants to spring forward on my own, but this Libra moon whispers that we need others to make new soil of our burnt up dreams and wishes. Ashes are no good composted on their own. They need to be mixed into the pile in the right amounts. 

What does this mean to how I exist in the world? How do I offer myself? What do I receive? How worthy do I feel to give of my gifts and accept those of others in return?

Ashes are powerful because they are cleansing. Ashes clean silver and sweep up dirt. In the same way, my shadow cleans me. My darkness, once thoroughly burned, becomes the purifying potential of my future self. I can be washed clean by those parts of myself I don't want to see, if I am patient enough to observe them. 

And if Spring relies on anything, it is patience, as the flowers recently shared with me during a plant journey with a client. 

In the Garden with the Flowers

Swelling and blossoming into being
eating and being eaten
growing
sticky and green
we wait to become
who we are
when the time is right
we swell and open
becoming tall
Hollyhock 
Sunflower
Magnolia 
Tulip
Daffodil
stretching out
from darkness
we trust
we know
we will grow into ourselves
at the right time
a message of seeing
potential in the dark
we don't have to fight 
or strive
or stress
the blooming happens
and we are able
to allow our hearts
to grow into flowers
our special nectar 
our essence 
each particular flower speaking.

With the ashes laid in the garden, I prepare the soil. I learn that I only have to prepare the container for what comes next.

I've been offering more timed writing blocks during sessions with creatives. The timed writing container allows for automatic flow of the pencil or pen - too often we break abruptly from the inspiration and don't allow the strand of thought to coalesce onto the page. Setting a timer and writing creates a garden for my words to land in, a fertilized bed.

Next time that you write, don't hold any expectations. Set a timer and sit back and allow. See what comes. What message did you think wanted to come? How are you surprised by what does? When do you think the poem should end, and what comes after you think is should be over? 

This Full Moon was conjunct Venus and my natal Venus. I've been feeling a lot of expansion around my business and my Earth mission - my writings and my offerings. I'm have a few spots for three or six month creative coaching containers. What is a session with me like? 

Can I share how incredibly talented Amy is? First, Amy spent a few minutes talking with me about the herbs in my garden and which of them I had been connecting to lately. Then, we chatted a little about my writing practice and some goals I have around it. Amy led a visualization that took me to my herb garden where I connected with a plant I haven’t learned much about but felt drawn to. The ability to go deep was super-supported by the incredible gift Amy has in creating the loveliest of visualizations. I’m also learning more about this plant (Wormwood) and am looking forward to bringing it into my writing practice and using it to support my health. The final piece in this lovely session was getting a follow-up email that detailed all we had discussed. I can’t say enough good things about how lovely the time with her was. <3

- K.C. in Kentucky

My sessions are all particularly tailored to your particular creative and physical needs and may include meditation, writing, EFT tapping and breathing exercises. Make an appointment here to set up a free exploration with me:

Book a call

The next New Moon in Aries is the first New Moon of this solar cycle, so get ready for it. Empty out those ash buckets!

Lots of Green Love,

Amy

P. S. If you liked my flower channeled poem here, you might like to join my Patreon! I just offered Seven Spring Poems to my Earthlings tier and above. 

Bulbs like Eyes: Beauty in the Dark with the Full Moon in Libra

The Pleiades, courtesy of NASA

A Spider Moon

Last night’s Libra Full Moon was a Super Moon, called the Wind Moon, or a Pink Moon. For me she is the Spider Moon. Venus looks like a spider in the sky right now too, in her web, as she crosses the Pleiades, and right now there is a spider installed over my bed, a spider hanging over my body.

Pluto Conjunct Jupiter

Pluto was recently conjunct Jupiter which can explain a lot about our current feelings of magnified darkness and deep encounters with death. The recent Pluto Saturn conjunction also in Capricorn brings heavy lessons around limitation. These are powerful forces moving us all. Yet the confinement of the current social situation has the effect of making me more aware of small, magical correspondences, of relationship, of scale, which also makes sense. Libra, where the Moon shone out so beautifully for us last night, is all about relationship and balance, and suddenly I see it all around me, the beauty and harmony of relationships between elements of the Universe, from the smallest to the biggest, from the interior of my room to the immensity of the cosmos. The globes of my eyes and the globes of the planet, the globe we live on. Synchronicities appear everywhere, and I feel woven into the fabric of the magic that is all around me.

Spider Medicine

Spider medicine teaches that we weave our own reality. I’ve been experimenting for a while now with uncovering my true unconscious desires underneath the ones I identify with outwardly, using a method called Existential Kink, EK for short, invented by Carolyn Elliot, which basically entails finding pleasure and enjoyment in those aspects of your life that make you cringe. She just published a book on it if you are interested in finding out more about it. This method doesn’t just make the darkness light, putting your pretty shades on so that you don’t see the things that repulse you, it helps you cut through darkness to the darkness beneath, and it is overwhelmingly liberating. It allows you to see the darkest desire behind the darker desire (the ones we don’t want to admit). I’ve learned, for example, that my unconscious desires for scarcity and rejection are always pointing me towards freedom and liberty. I want to be independent at all costs. I even want to be free of love and money. Yes, those things that everyone is supposed to want, and that so many people lack, especially now. Strange that at a time when we are in quarantine and our more mundane liberties are being taken away (with sometimes scary implications - read this article by Charles Eisenstein for more on that), I am becoming more acutely aware of my own true desire to be utterly free, a desire I think we all share on some level, the founding desire of the country I live in now, supposedly, liberty and justice for all. And we are all also simultaneously becoming more aware, if you weren’t already only too aware, of inequity at this time. Were our movements ever free if so many of us live in bondage to some institution, structure or history? The very structure of our society limits what we can do and how we can do it because of the aforementioned more conscious desires for, you guessed it, love and money. The picture people are waking up to is not pretty, but I believe this time holds great potential for new methods of existing in relationship to ourselves, each other and the world around us, if we can push through the discomfort and grief. I say “push through” but I don’t mean it. I mean be with, be with the discomfort and the grief, be with yourself, be with each other, stay there a while, and see what transformation happens.

Being Free

At the Full Moon it is good to plant seeds. My unconscious desire for liberty has planted many seeds for me which have led to my current situation of scarcity and I see that I won’t be free of this scarcity until I become appreciative of all that these unconscious desires have done for me, liberating me from the tyranny of my more conscious desires for love and money. In this way I am also more free. I’m one step ahead of the patriarchy, however it wants to paint me. I beat it at its game. I don’t have what it tells me I should want, and I can take pleasure in this. And there is abundance in this. There is delicious, tender abundance when I look at all that is in the space around the things and the people I miss. There is the abundance of Spring, for one, the reminder that everything I need is literally growing at my doorstep. There is the abundance of love from the family I see in person and the friends I see virtually. “Poor me” becomes “Free me”.

How Bulbs Teach Me to See

I’ve been contemplating the bulbs that are coming up around me, thanks to the mysterious fire force of Spring. The Aries Sun shines down on my bed and wakes me too, warming the windows and activating the flies. I want the Spider to stay above my bed because there are so many flies. I open the windows to let the flies out and warm up in the sunny spots around the house. The bulbs are waking too, and I’ve written two poems about bulbs being like eyes, seeing in the dark, feeling safe there, finding security in the scarcity. I think it is the Daffodils talking to me, waking up too. What else do they say to me? They tell me of the darkness that gives birth to light. I ask them “Do you feel the slowing down of human activity as you quicken into blooming, into life?” I ask them “Teach me to embrace the night”. I’ll put the finished poem of this dialogue over on my Patreon page for subscribers, but in essence they tell us how to appreciate the darkness and grow towards the light.

Purple Iris

Speaking appreciating the darkness, I’ve started to offer my line of shadow flower essences up on my website. These are flowers that have helped me in my own process of shadow work and integration or have communicated to me that they are here to help people process trauma and difficult life experiences. The most recent one I attuned with, Purple Iris, says it beautifully.

Darkness that pierces through darkness,

purple flame, light of spirit,

light me up, speak the truth.

Messages I receive from Source, 

divine guidance from darkness, 

expansive, I am able to share.

Sovereign unto myself,

I channel words of clarity 

from within a cave of protection.

I am not afraid of death.

I approach it for insight.

Clarity comes from purple light.

The Moon says, deep desires illuminated beautifully.
Beauty round illuminates you the desire.
I wrote that last line in the moonlight.

Be whole, be you , and don’t forget to talk to the flowers.

Love,

Amy

Oh, and make an appointment with me here if you want to talk about working with me and the plants to expand your creative practice or heal stuck patterns! I have opened up my hours and offer a free exploratory call if you are curious or just want to talk. The flowers have taught me how to listen.

A Full Cabbage Moon in Aries: Vegetables, Fear, and Coming into Confidence

The milkweed is blowing to seed, the calendula still blooming, blooming, reflecting the leaves that are falling, falling, as I write. They reached their red peak on the weekend when we were blessed with sunny, bright days of golden mornings and blue afternoons. I harvested and chopped cabbages, some of them 15 pounds, and as I observed them, held them, felt into their growing and their becoming, I realized the cabbage is a lunar plant. I am fascinated by planetary plant correspondences, and I love feeling into them instead of looking them up. The cabbage is lunar because of its color and shape, and also its growth cycle and fermentation cycle, which swells and responds to the lunar energies. Inside, it looks like a brain, which tells us something about our own dispositions too: how lunar we are with our swellings, mental and emotional, as well as physical. Last night’s abundant Full Moon brought some swelling in my ankle and an awareness of what I need to do to better be able to receive. In many ways, this is the culmination of the New Moon’s energies for me. I like tracking the movement between the two.

This Full Moon brought overwhelm, excitement, self-expression, new beginnings and a certain amount of fear that accompanied it all. I like making an intention to release at every Full Moon, and fear is what I want to release this time around; fear doesn’t do well in Aries. It becomes aggressive and agitated. As the leaves fall, I’m deciding to continue releasing this fear stored in my body. I’ve worked enough on where it comes from, I’ve understood the patterns, I’ve seen its cause and effect, and now it is the time to let it go. I can track it in the body. Where is it today? What is it wanting to say? I’ve been doing a daily EFT tapping routine that helps. Mars, Aries’ main planet, is in Libra, where he doesn’t feel so comfortable either, and this has me aware of my own fear and aggression as it relates to those around me. How can I be with the discomfort of fear and the reactions that it brings while holding respectful space for myself and others?

The Aries-Libra axis in the sky runs between the opposites of personal expression and relational ease. At one end of the spectrum, we are at the extreme of putting our needs first, and at the other we are forgetting ourselves to accommodate the other. At the Full Moon, the Moon, now at the end of Aries, fully reflected the light of the Sun, which is in Libra. Both energies of these poles can be lived in the energy of fear or confidence, which are opposite but also complimentary. Fear in some sense allows me to be confident, while confidence pushes me to accept the things I fear. In relationship, we can fear our mistakes and our imperfections: much of the last few years I’ve explored the experience of rejection. If we fear rejection, we often reject things about ourselves. If we reject ourselves, we often fear the rejection of others, and this can then be reflected in our daily lives. I remember I had a dance teacher once who would say to me as I was dancing, don’t reject yourself. I don’t know how she saw that I was doing it as I danced. Rejecting ourselves can be something we do physically without even realizing we are doing it, so it can be good to sit with and consider the things we might be rejecting in ourselves. These could be positive as well as negative things. We might be rejecting our beauty and grace, not just our awkwardness and mistakes. So I think Libra and Aries can teach us confidence despite our shortcomings and with our gifts, both with ourselves and in relation to others.

It is normal, with the fall, to return to past lessons of loss and to see our lives slip by in a sepia-toned newsreel. Yet our lives, like the planets, are always moving. They are not fixed and relatable in a linear way, but movable reflections of our current perceptions. With the Full Moon, we also moved through a square between the Sun and the Moon and Pluto. This brought me the desire to stand in my own power, and I practiced that, being seen, not refusing my own brightness. These reflections were inspired by Kaypacha’s weekly Pele Report, and my sense of the Full Moon as benevolent and abundant came from a Vedic astrologer I like to follow, Keri Shields of Anandashree Astrology. The light of the Full Moon invited us to connect to the energy of the Goddess Lakshmi, born on this night, from the ocean, like Venus. This benevolent energy can accompany us through the waning moon period, which can often make us feel vulnerable and fearful. Venus is in Scorpio now, a dark place for the goddess of beauty to be, so we can remedy any feelings of inadequacy with reminders of Lakshmi’s abundant generosity. Writing this, I’m reminded of how the Full Moon is, ultimately, a time that heightens the polarities. I realize this whole post has been about moving between extremes. This will also become gentler as we roll through fall to the next New Moon. Thank goodness! The energies of both fear and confidence can be tiring and I find, as I’m writing and getting ready to share, that they are both running strongly through me.

I wonder what else I’ll be moving through, and what you are moving through too. If you would like some help coming into confidence, please make a free exploratory call with me. I made a Daikon essence recently, after weeks of working with the plant as a crop that we are transforming into kim-chi, and I love the lesson of this magical, white, root vegetable. It spoke to me of deep-rooted expression. It would love to help you reach your own depths, stand in your power and speak your truth. I’d love to work with you, your cycles, the cycles of the moon and the planets, and the plants, to help you claim your divine creative expression and be seen, shining like a flower. Please connect if you are feeling like you could use some support as you are coming into your own confidence. The world needs your light at this time.

Daikon Flower

I wish you many golden mornings and blue afternoons, while we slip into the darkness of winter.

A New Moon in Libra: How I Broke Up with My Phone and Learned to Relate to Myself

Holding Calendula instead of my phone. She’s much sweeter!

Lately I feel so strange to myself. My phone broke. I think it was because of a flower. The last picture I took was of a Datura I was communing with in a friend’s garden. And then an update wouldn’t take, and wouldn’t take and wouldn’t take until it wouldn’t turn on at all. So I’ve left it on a chair. I broke up with my phone.

My life without a phone: I miss my astrology application that tells me about the times and placements of alignments and risings and settings of planets and sun. I miss my menstrual cycle tracker. I think that’s about it. What I don’t miss are the hours I wasted staring into a device that doesn’t reflect the world around me or allow me to engage with it. It’s scary to think we are all so used to doing this, to perceiving the world more and more through this interface.

My first smart phone was given to me by a boyfriend in 2012. I felt some resistance, but agreed to engage for a little while. Unfortunately I did not give up the phone at the end of the six month relationship and it has been with me ever since. But I don’t think my phone is compatible with plant communication somehow, so it’s interesting that it has given up the ghost now. What I notice since living without it: My sleep is different, longer or shorter, and more intense. My days are longer and I do more. There are more hours. I engage more with my surroundings. I see more beauty. I talk to more flowers. As I go phoneless, I receive more messages from the universe. It’s that simple. And what do we receive from the Universe? The love that starts us and keeps us going. I never received that from my phone.

This new moon is about receiving love. Venus will soon rise as the evening star and beam down on me. Am I ready to take it all in? I think my phone was getting in the way. My other blocks to receiving love are still there of course but it’s as if I can see them more clearly. Maybe it’s because I’m not staring into a screen to avoid them. I’ve lost my main means of distraction from myself. I wonder at this object, small and shiny, produced as a product to make me into one (conversations at the farm have been about commodification of the self) and as I take a step back from it, I become more myself. The world spins. I make decisions. I may take fewer pictures, but I see more. I don’t have anything to show for myself, but I am more myself without this constant thing to check. It does make it a bit strange to be in the present world, but I suppose no stranger than it is for a flower to be today, or a butterfly. I want to be whole and rooted. I am seeding thankfulness and gratefulness, sun-ward, like them.

I also wanted to write about wholeness – another moon whisper. The cosmic energies are not particularly harmonious at the moment: Venus is square the Moon’s nodes and Saturn who sits on the south one, so there is a karmic tension about endings. Fall has come and we are descending into darkness, moving away from our mothering aspects of self. Perhaps we are being too harsh on ourselves. I’m thinking about relationship and those that brought me into darkness and those that brought me out. I’ve often felt, and been told, that I give too much, but I see now that my giving was seeking to fill a void I sensed, to bring balance, to fill in what was missing there: a too cold heart, an unfeeling mind. My balancing act with others was a beautiful, if sometimes painful, art. I’ve since learned that the only void I can really fill is the one inside myself and that people should do their own void filling for themselves, so I don’t try so hard now. I’m finding my own divinity and learning from this divine within myself. The planets of my birth chart as they move through the sky remind me of the universe moving within myself, all these complex aspects, singing together. Outside as inside, that old saying, the moon reminds us too, balancing the dark and the light.

 What are your new moon intentions? Now is the time to send out what you would like to bring in. The new moon is dark longing, followed by, when she meets the sun, receptivity and becoming, openness to change. I feel the moon slipping down to the void of herself, the void of me. I’m a thin sliver now, dreaming of the dark, not yet anticipating Spring, but reveling in what the roots speak to me. This morning I made an altar and petitioned the planets for a little while. I’d love to help you start a moon centered ritual cycle. Let me know if you think creative coaching with me might help you connect to the universe and write, paint, sing, draw or work on your pet project with the help of the plants! May you listen deeply!

Two Full Moons in Libra: Connection and What it Means to Be Human

We are officially in Taurus season now, and I’m feeling juicily rooted in Spring. It’s really happening. The branches are bursting into my favorite greens. Yesterday’s Full Moon, the second of two in Libra, had me fasting and darkly contemplative. What do I need to let go of? I thought of my relationships, as one does when a celestial body is highlighted in Libra. Some are falling away. I had very vivid dreams before the Full Moon and I fasted and did some inner alchemy work to open my own perception. I walked in the fathomless fathoms for a day. The world felt strange. But today I woke up clear-headed and I notice that the warm relationships around me are blossoming as I shed outdated versions of myself and commit to more fully living in my heart. As I let those relationships fall away that want to fall away, there is more room for fulfillment within those that are present. I hold them close to me.

First Libra Full Moon and Young Magnolia Tree

The Moon-Bathing Plants

The first Full Moon in Libra was on the Equinox and I didn’t write about it specifically, though I mentioned it in my last post. I took a walk in the night and experienced my connection to the moon-bathing plants. At the time I didn’t know how it was related to relationship for me, but in my evolution from that night to last night, I can see how the lunar cycle changed me. I think both moons taught me something about what it means to be human.

Movement Defines Life

Studying biology with my student, I am reminded that movement defines life. In movement, we encounter others, and this means that to be alive means to be in relationship. What kinds of relationship surround us? We relate to other humans, of course. We are born into a family and if we are deprived of relating we do not develop. We are beings of language and we know (from some sad, accidental “experiments”) that if we don’t relate to other people, we don’t get language. The kind of relating we get defines the kind of language we have, so the two are entwined, our words and our becoming human. Materialists are aware of this level of relationship. We are also, inevitably, as animals, in relationship to our environment. We can be aware, perhaps not always consciously, of our relationship to that which surrounds us. This is our Earth home, our ecology, and we cannot survive if we do not carry some sense of this awareness. There is another level of relationship that I am aware of and this is our relationship to the unseen realms, to spirits, to potential worlds, and to our imagination, which I believe is outside of us.

We Are Floating In Story

Hildegard von Bingen said that the soul is not in the body, rather it is the body that is in the soul, and I feel this: I feel as if our bodies are floating in this sea of relationship to soul or to source. As we are created by language, we are floating in story (as my teacher Martin Shaw reminds me), held by these unseen realms as though in a thick web of being and becoming. We are always moving within this unseen network that ties us to the land and the heavens, to the past and future. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming; maybe that is why our materialist society isn’t very good at seeing it.

Second Libra Full Moon and Street Lights

My relationship to the plants (first Libra Full Moon) has helped me see how my relationships to others (second Libra Full Moon) are conditioned by my ability to sense into how interconnected I am to the whole. If my sense of connection is missing on one of the levels I described above, whether interpersonal, environmental or spiritual, my relating will be off and I won’t be able to fully relate to anyone, including myself. Yet it is difficult to maintain this feeling state of interconnection in today’s world.

On Trauma and Connection

I posted an article on Facebook that I will share again here, on trauma and connection, which seemed to speak to many people who responded to the post. Perhaps many of us recognize on a deep level that this life is merely a process of becoming more and more connected again, where death is the final merging, and I think that is why I want to work with the plants and help others do the same: they bring us back to this feeling of connection to the whole that we, for the most part, are sorely missing.

Wood, On Some Level, Is Meant To Burn

When Notre Dame cathedral was burning in Paris, my first thought was that wood, on some level, is meant to burn. Wooden churches burned all the time in the Middle Ages. It is surprising that that roof survived for so long at all. Everyone was very sad about it. So much money poured in for the repairs. It seems to represent much more to people than starving families or devastated rain-forests, dying oceans or drowning islands. Many people on social media were critical of this, and I was too, though I can also understand the widespread dismay. It was something we wanted to hold on to, that we wanted to stay, a symbol of who we are, a reassuring fixture. Yet the medieval forest in the roof of that cathedral was in some sense waiting to rise into smoke. It is our human hubris to think that it needs to exist in order for us to feel a connection to our past or a spiritual connection. And I remembered my experience of Our Lady, Mary, whom I met in Corsica three years ago, brought to my knees, in tears, smelling roses as I passed in front of the church door - it was the strongest spiritual experience I have ever had and such a gift of forgiveness and wholeness. I, a Quaker, almost became Catholic, and with what I know about the history of the Catholic Church, that is saying a lot. I know her as a divine life force whose essence is the feeling of grace, who helps me remember my connection to the vast flower of life. She is invisible, though I do give her some form on my altar. Notre Dame is not a place; it is an energy, like love, that ties us together, and she wants us to feel connected again. Maybe that is why she burned that day. There was a general movement of support and communion around her glorious edifice. And her windows are intact. I was very pleased with that.

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

So, what does it mean to be human? It does feel hard to find the words for that, but this is my take on it, for what it's worth. I hope it is satisfying to you in some way. My thanks to Nicole for the prompt!

I worked on my website some more today: new buttons to connect to my Patreon page and a new page with my writing on it and a better home page design and some improved copy I hope.

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks but connected and happy to connect with you at any time. You can schedule a free exploration call with me or an energy healing session under the creative coaching and energy healing tabs on my website. Or you can write : amy@enosburghessences.com

May Our Lady bless your connections and hold you in the light.