The Fire Inside: A Full Moon in Virgo

While living with a wood stove, I have learned so much about fire: how it burns and revives, dies and returns, burns slowly and steadily or roars and devours. The other night I dappened down the fire down so much that when I opened the stove in the morning, a puff of smoke escaped and the blackened wood gasped for air before roaring back to life after a whole night of waitings. This describes how I have felt this past week, as if my own energy were just waiting to be released, and the fire behind my projects rekindled. Poof! Smoke out, smoke in, a sudden burning, a warming of the surroundings and, I am awake! I saw the shadow of smoke on the snow. For now the fire burns inside.

I need to ground the flame. My dreams around this Full Moon have been intense and restless. I dreamed I was wearing a yellow apron. I dreamed I was back in school, learning. I dreamed I was teaching, which I'll go back to in real life this week. The night of the Full Moon, she woke us up when she was exact. The following day I drew the Hermit card. In Tarot, the Hermit card represents Virgo, and this noble Virgin said to me:

Look inside for the fire inside. Outer reaching only gets us so far.

This is a lesson from the plants too. The heart of growth lies deep within the seed. A reminder not to take too much in. All I need are a little light and air to blaze again.

In a session with a client recently Sunflower came to me. She offered me a golden oil which she poured down my throat, soothing and reviving me.

A Gift from the Flowers

Sometimes our fire inside can feel terrifying, obsessive and dark. Our addictions may come to light, those things that we burn for that do not do us any favors. Our desires may sometimes feel taboo. But your fire inside need not scare. Our passionate desires can light up the dark and burn away shadows, even the ones we'd rather not see. Your fire inside feeds your growth.

The fact that light casts a shadow remains one of the paradoxes of fire. Flame also produces smoke, a kind of shadow too, yet we were born to face this conundrum, thanks to the fire inside of us. We are both dark and light.

Our own shadows can feel heavy at this time of year. As I write this, I am sitting through another snow squall, witnessing March coming in like a lion. I'm turning to the energy of Pisces to sooth last month's excessive Aquarian energy. The Sun is in Pisces with Venus, approaching Neptune, Venus' higher octave, so reality may at times feel dreamy and watery too. We can allow ourselves to be rocked in these watery energies within us, our fire finding balance. The seed needs both too.

Believe in Spring

One morning last week the weather was so warm I forgot to stoke the fire. I was caught up in doing and I forgot that at this time of year, the fire always needs tending. The last few months have felt like that. My inner fire needed some tending, and this school holiday has given me that. I needed some time to rest and feel into the warmth that was growing. I needed to believe in Spring.

Flowers are surprising. Pictured here is an image of Cleomes I drew last Summer, strong and sticky. I don’t know Cleomes very well. I was pleasantly surprised when, the other day, thinking of my business and how I wanted it to grow, going through old notes, I discovered this drawing I had forgotten I had made, on a warm, sweet day, of a strange, exciting flower. I look forward to the blooms that will grow with me this Summer. I dream of connecting to them and sharing my musings with you in the coming months.

Let me know if you would like to discuss a Spring collaboration. I have a few spots available for three or six month one-on-one creative coaching programs, to support you as you rise into the Spring on the wings of your inner fire. What will the Spring bring for you? I am currently working on a creative writing project with a client and a green business venture with a curator turned entrepreneur. You can make an appointment to speak with me about your project here.

In the meantime, keep stoking your fires!

Love,

Amy

The Full Moon in Pisces: Full Artistic Expression

A painting by Lorre Strain Welsh

An Artistic Life

This Full Moon had me on vacation, thinking about the artistic life. I am spending time with my partner’s mother who is an artist in her 90’s. Her house is filled with a lifetime of paintings and artwork that embody her devotion to her craft. She still sits in the corner and paints. Her paintings are often tributes to her large family: she also has 5 kids and three times as many grandkids. Her life-long productivity impresses me, and has me thinking about how I want to spend the rest of my days.

Essential Purpose

I was able to ask her a few questions about her practice. The first thing she said was that she always knew she would paint and draw, she was born to do these things. Feeling this purpose in your artistic expression is essential. Similarly, I always knew I would write. What is your “I always knew” form of expression?

Essential Practice

We need to listen to this calling daily and take action, building up our practice in small ways, and in this way building up the material results of our practice too. Like a matriarch surrounded by her children, she must feel full and proud to be surrounded as she is by her paintings, the fruit of her labor. She said she always made it a priority, even though it wasn’t always her husband’s priority and may have cramped his style.

Perfection Isn’t Human

On the difficulty that arises when we seek the perfect, she said that perfection isn’t human. We talked about embracing the flaw. Imperfections become an element that draws attention to our very human acts of creation. We need not let the constraints of others constrain our own work. Watching her teaches me that we can dare to be our own imperfect forms of creation.

A Full Moon of Full Emotion

With this creative inspiration in the background of the deep rest of my vacation, this Pisces Full Moon spoke to me of feeling the fullness of emotion, and in this fullness, learning to let the feelings go. Letting things go means feeling them fully, noticing what I put into myself to feel full, and allowing myself to feel the full feelings.

Feeling Feelings

The feelings that make me feel full aren’t always desired feelings. I’m learning to allow myself to feel the pleasure, itself a kind of fullness, of feelings I’d rather banish to some far and distant part of myself. If I banish feelings, I can’t feel them fully, and I can’t let them go. This is why shame is so harmful to us. Shame keeps us from feeling things fully, and thus from fully processing and releasing difficult experiences. They build up in our psyche and then we can’t even begin to know what it is to feel full of pleasure or joy. The truth is, if you are feeling an emotion, it is asking you to feel it fully, so you may as well do so without question. This doesn’t mean you need to act on it, but you can allow your body to hold it, and feel into it without judgment.

Safely Holding Emotions

We need to build a container to do this though, especially if we have trauma that has taught us that our bodies are not safe containers for our feelings. A relationship with another human can help us hold and process feelings, as can our relationship to the Earth. We can build the container at an altar, in the forest, with a tree. Find a safe place to go to in order to feel what you need to feel.

Watery Release

Pisces thinks the bath is best. Water takes on our emotions and allows us to drain them out, releasing and letting go. Or if you can, take your emotions to the sea. The sea constantly carries away what we shed, over and over again, rhythmically. You can ask the sea to take away your full emotion by throwing a rock or letting the sand run out of your hand. You can also go to a river or stream, where, rushing or flowing, your emotion will meander over stones and be set free.

Artistic Practice as Container

Our artistic practice can also be a container for our processing of emotions. We might not make art from this that we want to present or sell, but we can use our creative expression as the container that helps us feel and release emotion. Creative expression can help us heal painful emotions. Poetry has often served this function for me.

Virgo Season

The Sun is currently in Virgo, where it shines on the watery world of Pisces. Virgo is opposite Pisces on the wheel of the Zodiac, and in some ways this mutable earth sign contrasts with the fish’s mutable water energy. In other ways it is the perfect compliment. As I apply Virgo tactics to my full Piscean range of emotion, I have a model for the practical application of my art. Virgo season makes lists. I need to make time to do the things I want to do, the things I need to do, on my list. I need to practice my craft in real time, not just in make-believe or dream time. Finding time for completion is necessary, and this is what I might focus on in the coming weeks. I will have to quarantine when I get home and I have things I want to finish. As we move to the New Moon, which will be in Virgo, I can feel accomplished in my artistic expressions, and like the beautiful maiden in the stars, complete unto myself and whole.

Where are the Plants?

I realize I haven’t mentioned the plants in this download! Maybe it is because I am away from my garden. I know that my sunflowers have blossomed and my squash plants are still flowering and waiting for me to come gather their fruit. The plant life where I am is rather muted, by golf course and strip mall, but I know that this is all the more reason to go outside and reach out. If you want to do so where you are, check out my free guide to plant communication. You can sign up for it here. I’d love to talk to you about your creative process and you can sign up for a free talk about it here. I help people, especially women, create the container - be the container - in which their creativity can blossom.

A picture my niece took of my garden! The Sunflowers are blooming!

As ever, my flower essences are available for purchase and I can help you choose a personalized one with a private consultation.

I hope your Summer ends sweetly and your blossoming leads to many fruits.

Love,

Amy

Fire in Water: The Full Moon in Pisces and Emotional Clarity

The wind that started on the last New Moon kept blowing from the South, culminating in the wild wind on the night of the Full Moon, which called to us through the pines on the mountain we climbed and descended, and banged and clanged about our heads in the cabin we slept in. We heard every acorn that dropped, each one pinging off the roof, waking us up and keeping us vigilant to her energies through the night. In the morning some phone lines were down and I felt breathless and full, my ideas overflowing. Here I will spill what I gathered from that light, a dark fire burning in the watery world of emotion. We offered gifts to the mountain and I was gifted clarity. Now the purple asters are blooming and the trees are turning orange and red, beginning their fall turning.

This watery Pisces Full Moon had me feeling deeply emotional, reeling in and out of feeling states. My Sun is in Pisces, so this wasn’t a surprise, and emotions are often high for me at a Full Moon, but this one felt particularly confusing. The Moon was also near Neptune and Lilith, so I also felt extra dreamy, almost overwhelmed with choices and illusion. How do we let our magic flow out into the world? I let myself move through these states, noting them and feeling them down to their core. This is a good practice, to notice an emotion, stop with it and hold it. Where does it come from? What is behind the anger, the sadness, the pain, or the joy, happiness and fulfillment I am feeling? I noticed that I tend to put certain feelings in boxes: my sexual attraction and longing for connection becomes romantic attachment, my sadness becomes poignant nostalgia, my joy becomes fulfilled desires and satisfaction. But when I stop and feel my emotions as energy, they become both less and more. I don’t have to control them or even make them fit into a box. They are there to show me something, to help me pass through something and move forward. They are there to show me what I want and what I don’t want. I don’t need to project them. I practice witnessing them and welcoming them and, when I can, sharing them. Then they are let loose in a way. I let go of the layers of stories I have attributed to them. I am wind-beaten and a little sore, but I am sitting on a mountain with a vantage point, feeling my connection to the Earth, to others and to my own core.

Emotions are the sensing feelers we put out into the world. Like a plant’s flowers, these emotions both pick up and send out energies. When our emotions are clear and balanced, we both draw in what we need – the pollinators who will help us make seed – and protect ourselves from what we don’t want – the other beings who do not have our best intentions in mind. Emotions help us survive, and thus are intrinsically tied to our bodies, our sense of survival and our instincts. I am learning to read what my emotions are telling me, as a human in this world. This takes time, but I am getting better at it. I can more easily observe instead of jump to conclusions, react or cling. I can admit to myself things I have been avoiding, desires I have not acknowledged, yearnings that have sat too long in the dark and are ready to be planted and sprout.

This last cycle has also brought me renewed awareness of friendship and my connection to others. My connections are increasingly central to my exploration of relationship to the flowers, and vice versa. Today I made a Datura essence in a friend’s garden, because she invited me to come meet the plants she has been lovingly tending. This weekend I worked on a farm with other community members and watched how I was triggered, and then soothed, in waves. The weekend before I sang with friends in Quebec and became more aware of how singing is about the vibrational state of “being with”: being with others, being with myself, being with the world. And this Full Moon I was not alone, but with a friend with whom I could share all these little bits of swirling emotions; every little forgotten flower could open up and come out and bathe in the moonlight. Here I am! Even my shame. A Rosa Rugosa plant told me recently: Know your own beauty! And though I struggle with this, my friends help me. I remember Rosa Rugosa’s message in the mornings when I wake up and look at myself in the mirror. I remember when I see a friend looking at me lovingly. May you all be blessed with the awareness of the love beaming at you from the world, from the eyes of a friend or from the late summer blooms who are spying on you.

My energy has now turned towards bringing in what I will need for the next season, preparing myself for the darker days and longer nights that will come. I’m working outside quite a bit, harvesting, harvesting, chopping, chopping, cleaning, cleaning, serving the humans who will eat the fermented foods I am preparing, but also serving the plants. More and more I feel I am on a mission for them, doing their bidding, and so it feels right to help people connect with them. I feel like a plant translator or interpreter. I teach their language. Soon I’ll write a guide to help others open up to our innate capacity to understand and commune with the plant world. In the meantime, let me know if you want to talk about it! I am offering a free exploratory call to talk about your existing relationship to the plant realm and how deepening your connection could help you. I have several coaching programs that will allow you to start to work with them, ultimately building your own practice in order to work with them on your own. I take into account your astrological chart, your current work with or distance from plants, and your personal goals around living a creative life. What do you think they have to say to you?

A New Moon Wind: Virgo vs. Pisces or How to Love Your Non-Duality

The divided world… Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, 11th Century

I woke up last Friday to the sound of the wind, blowing from the South, and I thought of the forest fires in the Amazon and the hurricane preparing over the southern oceans. Where was I feeling this storm, this burning? A few weeks ago I had the shingles and felt that they were the reflection on my skin of the forests in Siberia burning. The Amazon, I think, I’m feeling as a burning from within. There is a rage at how things ARE. I observe this destructive time and the small or big ways I see it all around me. Then there are the ways this destructive time is within me, and I am a part of it.

I recently I bought a car. This is something I thought I would never do, since I saw the car as the epitome of all I dislike about our current system: speed, waste, environmental destruction, blind humanity racing towards its own demise. But the reality of living in rural Vermont has dawned on me and to my surprise, now that I have bought one - with all the harrowing emotions of the first time! - having a car is one of the most freeing things I have ever done. So I’ve had to hold these two parts of myself as one: the me that hates using fossil fuels and the me that loves to be independently mobile and who is a very part of the destructive world I can observe as if I were separate.

This realization was humbling. Seeing the world as separate from ourselves equals holding ourselves above it, and I think so many of our problems come from this perceived division between ourselves and the world around us. I put a barrier between myself and others, between me and the Earth and Sky, because I fear that I can’t integrate my own complexity. But my recent illness taught me once again that we are one: my body is your body is the Earth’s body.  

When I sat down to listen to the wind, the New Moon in Virgo spoke to me of duality. Virgo wants to do everything right (one of the first things I saw when I woke up was the image on the right, the cover of a magazine on the kitchen counter!) and on Friday the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars and Mercury were all there, in Virgo. That’s called a stellium in astrology speak, and that’s a lot of energy focused on everyone wanting to do everything right. My Sun is in Pisces who sits opposite Virgo in the sky, which means that all of these planets were hanging out reflecting the light of my natal Sun, my shining Self (some call it the ego). Pisces, in some ways, represents the opposite of wanting to do things right. Sometimes Pisces is the opposite of doing anything at all. Virgo is about distinction, contrast and duality, while Pisces is about merging, nuance and ambiguity. Virgo doesn’t want to go with the flow. Pisces is content to sit in the water and float. Sometimes she doesn’t even care if she is going anywhere. So I know this duality. And we all have it, just as we all have all the other contrasts that the sky represents for us: the outgoing and the shy, the confident and the embarrassed, the joyful and the depressed. These all make up a part of the little fractal beings that we are and each one of these parts is illuminated differently by the stars at different times. It can be a lot to get used to. Especially with all the planets staring at you.

So just as the darker parts of ourselves can seem overwhelming at times, sometimes the devastation we see on the outside, especially if we focus on it exclusively, can seem like a lot. People are more or less touched by it and we all have different strategies for dealing with it at our disposal. I think it is good to remember this too, that we are all touched differently by the outside world, with more or less privilege and protection, and this realization can also bring its own breath of welcome humility. As for my strategies, I tend to search for historical explanations and create through it, that is I use the catastrophe to motivate me towards some form of artistic expression, or the destruction becomes the matter for creation. I like seeing the big picture too, and if this doesn’t work, I notice my divisive thoughts and choose not act on them. I may choose to open them up for discussion with a trusted friend or two. This often reveals my contradictions for what they are and helps me step back into a more holistic view. The plants also help me do this. They are constantly reminding of the blessings in perceived difficulty or darkness. I realized my illness – the shingles! – as uncomfortable as it was, was also an introduction to the healing powers of Saint John’s Wort, who is now forever in my heart, in my apothecary and within my body of skills as a healer to offer when someone else might have need for it.

It’s also good to see our one-sided vision for what it is: a kind of blindness. Not that we should ignore the calls for change, the new wind that is blowing, which are becoming louder and more demanding by the day, but just that we should insist on seeing the whole picture, for ourselves and the people around us. My whole picture includes driving a car but also doing a lot of work on the land and in my community in order to embody the change I want to see. It’s not going to be perfect, I’m not going to do everything right, but I am going to live in my corner of the world and shed light and peace around me, as much as I can. You are probably doing this too.

The fires are burning and the animals are dying, but more and more people are waking up. It’s as if the fires are lighting up collective consciousness, showing us the way. And in the burning, there subsists a little green. I talked to a fisherman the other night and he said there were no fish in the streams, but I took a walk through the woods to a pond and saw them, small, swimming upstream. I don’t know where the world is going, but I know it’s going to be okay. I’m becoming more and more friends with myself every single day.

A friend sent me bits of this poem by Mary Oliver the other day. Here is the whole thing, for her, and for you. It captures something.

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

                                             1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

                                             2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

                                             3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
   still another.

                                             4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

                                             5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
   change.
Congratulations, if
   you have changed.

                                             6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
   fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
   your life—
what would do for you?

                                             7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

***

The poet is clear here, so I don’t need to say anymore.

Love and later summer gleaming,

Amy

P.S. Let me know how this new moon felt to you by getting in touch (amy@enosburghessences.com) or setting up an appointment to talk!

March New Moon and Mercury Retrograde in Pisces: Back Pain, A Bad Tooth and 8 Piscean Self-Care Practices

Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

My neck and back have been hurting for days and I have been working on my past. The backs of our bodies: this is where we carry our past so it can be useful, if there is pain there, to look at the memories or weight from that past that you are carrying. It can be heavy and I like to use EFT tapping to release it. This time I realize I am still carrying, among other things, an old story of childhood pain which has resulted in a very basic feeling of not liking myself. I purge it again. I know this is a very common human feeling so I wanted to address it here. I wonder how we learn it.

How Did We Get Here?

From the point of view of a river or a plant, it is completely ridiculous to not like yourself. For animals, it also makes no sense; it is counter-intuitive to survival. How could a deer not like itself? It's in the moment, being a deer. A dog could perhaps appear to not like itself, but I think they just learn it from us. We are animals: how did we lose touch with our survival instinct and come to hate ourselves? There are probably many books on this, and I've probably read and forgotten some of them, but I would like to know, how did we make a world in which we are so sick with dislike for ourselves that we are destroying the very planet we live on? How did we get here?

Self-Hate As A Coping Mechanism

A coping mechanism. A kind of protection. When you are small, you cannot control your surroundings and many of our surroundings are not conducive to supporting the life of something small. When I was born, I had three siblings and two parents, all of whom were more or less going about their life. I was an element within, an object of this family scenario. I was not born ready to step off and lean into my life once I had learned safely how to walk. I was picked up, put down, and since our rhythms as a society are off, often the rhythms we impose on children are off. I remember it feeling awful. So we are born but some of us, upon arrival, don't want to be here, which turns into not wanting to be alive which of course then we have to repress because you are not supposed to be alive and not want to be alive, so maybe the self-hate is a kind of coping mechanism, a form of self-protection in this world that we only half want to be in. Maybe we can't bear this feeling of not really wanting to be alive unless we justify it by hating ourselves. I wish we acted more like our animal selves.

It Is Time To Dig Down Into It

I think my back pain might actually be an infection in an old root canal I need to see to. The story of that tooth: once almost twenty years ago I got a cavity and I consulted a dentist I didn't know very well who filled it with a composite filling. A few years later, when I was in a diner, I bit into a piece of plastic in my coleslaw and the composite filling fell out and I had to get a root canal. I guess these things happen, but I think the cavity was probably too big to have been filled with composite. Anyways, bad dentist or not, the root canal itself was a terrible experience. I asked for a gold crown to be placed on top of it, to make it a little less terrible and have some gold in my mouth. This tooth has been bothering me for a while but I haven't paid attention to it and so the alive-dead tooth may be harboring an infection. I think this may be causing my neck to be stiff, which is a lot like how my alive-dead being in the world doesn't allow me to move about in my life easily. So it is time to dig down into it, or perhaps remove the tooth. My bad tooth is a good symbol for the parts of my past that are heavy and I need to let go of. Or it's like my self-loathing. I thought I needed a gold crown to be worth something.

I Go Back To The Stars And Think

How can one remove the tooth of ones' dislike for oneself? I'm not sure the metaphor works. I go back to the stars and think, this is just a time of falling away. This new moon in Pisces introduced us to the end of times as we float along in a haze. Well, it made me disoriented anyways, but maybe because I'm a Pisces and a Neptunian-Uranian, a Lemurian and a Pleiadian (look those last two up for some very strange youtube transmissions that always resonate with me). I'm actually not sure where I'm from but you can probably be glad you are not as confused about it as I am. It's not even the new moon anymore and I'm a week late with my new moon blog. Well, I've been dealing with this back pain, and other things. For one, Mercury just went retrograde in Pisces and Mercury is really confused in Pisces. He wanders around and just wants to lie down, a bit like I've been doing, staring at the stars and talking to plants.

Don’t Reject Yourself

Self-rejection. I once had a dance teacher who would say, as we danced, don't reject yourself. I couldn't even tell you how she knew I was doing it. It must have been in my movements. I always felt like she was reading some secret part of me that not even I could see. But as soon as she said it, I knew it was true, I was rejecting myself. Sometimes now I catch myself and tell myself not to do it.

Self-Care For People Who Don’t Really Like Themselves

So here are my 8 suggested self-care practices, especially good for the current astrological climate, from the heart of a true piscean, for people who, half the time, don't really like themselves:

1. Feel the comfort and support which is continually offered to your body by gravity. Feel how your back rests on the bed. Feel how your feet are held by the ground.

2. Take a bath. Take baths. Bless the water as it blesses you. If you feel bad about using too much water, think of the water you are blessing going back out into the world to bring transformation and healing. When you let the water out, stay in the bath and imagine you are letting go of whatever you want to let go of. Feel how nice and heavy with gravity you are afterwards.

3. Go slow. Walk slow. Eat slow. Move as little as you want to.

4. Go see your counselors, healers, therapists, doctors and dentists. You may need some help learning how to like yourself. With any luck, the person you go see may like him or herself a bit more than you like you. This will help you learn how to do it.

5. Don't send that message. You know the one. There have been two of them for me in the last 24 hours. Block the person or just sit tight with your opinions until you feel less reactive about the offenses that have been done to you, now and in the past. Other people often don't help you like yourself (unless they are one of the helpers listed in #4, but even then), especially when you lash out at them.

6. Actually, spend as little amount of time in front of screens as possible. This will also allow you to avoid having to deal with #5.

7. Make a list of your desires. Make a list of your fears. Notice how, most of the time, they cancel each other out. Contemplate that for a while. Take the time to write it all out.

8. Talk a walk, preferably near water. This will help you feel peaceful and composed even though you would rather be a fish swimming in the depths, waiting for spring. Content yourself with imagining that you are a fish.

Also Waiting For Spring

I think we are all a bit like fish at this time anyways, so the last one shouldn't be so hard. This means I'll have extra company as I go about my pre and post birthday days, in various moods, also waiting for spring.

I'm taking Hibiscus flower essence, for Faith (everything is going just as it should) and Sandalwood, for Grounded Spirituality, and Self-Heal, for my stiff neck and for Mercury retrograde. I'm also taking lots of vitamins and using these amazing new plant message oracle cards that I love. Remember, the plants only know how to love themselves, because doing anything else is just insanity.

Take care my fellow fish! I hope you find your joy in this sometimes disorienting sea.

Much love,

Amy

(Originally posted March 11, 2019