2023 the year we learn to listen to life

Week 20--in which a joyous New Moon invites us to plant a magic seed. And we discover Jack has nothing on us

Friends, soul writers, mystics, witches, and lovers of prayer,

Friday was a New Moon. But not just any New Moon. It was a magic New Moon.

There are 13 lunar cycles in a year, most of them around 29 days, but not all. The moon giggles looking at our patriarchal church-dictated linear calendars. She knows a week is not exactly 7 days of 24 hours each. She knows a month doesn’t even exist. And she should know, after all the word month comes from moon.

She and the sun must have quite the chuckle watching us attempt to wrestle a year into 365 days…until—oops—we have to add an extra day. Real time—the time of the cosmic dance of the sun and the moon—is not interested in the silly little boxes on our calendars. Each day one box, lining up in a row of 7 to make a so-called week, and four rows of boxes on top of each other filling a rather dreary looking page with black squares and labeling it a month.

We’ve looked at this linear calendar our entire lives and never questioned it.

It’s the calendar we grew up seeing in the kitchen with all the family events. It’s the calendar on the walls in our schools where we memorized the names of the days of the week. It’s the wall-sized calendar in our offices. And, in the time of the smartphone, it’s still the same calendar, it simply migrated to an electronic device.

No matter where the calendar is, the calendar is in charge. It dictates where we’ll be, and when, and for what purpose. It’s a dictator. A “get your ducks in a row,” “color inside the lines,” “turn in that report on time,” dictator.

I had one of those massive wall calendars over my desk for years. On it I posted all my classes in blue and radio shows in red with special events in green. I’d glance up at it constantly, not realizing that every time I looked, I panicked a little. How in the world can I get all this done? Like a beast of burden prodded to keep going, I’d turn back to my computer and get back to work.

And no one was making me do this. I was doing it to myself.

Until I met the creatrix of “The Moon is My Calendar,” April McMurtry, through shamanic astrologer and depth numerologist Emma Kupu Mitchell. April’s calendar is round. Round. And it doesn’t match the names of the months. It’s designed to show you a full lunar cycle from the dark new moon to the eve of the next dark moon, and that pattern doesn’t match our months.

Here's an example:

When I got my first Moon Calendar, I still had a linear wall calendar. But as I trained myself to fill in each day on the wheel of the moon’s constant waxing and waning, I found myself wincing when I looked up at the massive wall calendar. Just as April knew, the round lunar calendar, which was so much more in rhythm with me, my life, my soul, my explorations, my creativity became my calendar.

So when it was time to order the next standard calendar, I ordered a small one. One on which I could still record the dates of my classes, but one I could tuck away where I didn’t see it all day. I only pull it out when I’m talking with friends about when to schedule a prayer intensive.

By tracking what’s happening in my life on the circular moon calendar, I find I’m much more aware of the energy rising and falling in me as it rises and falls in the lunar cycle. But there’s one period when I pay the closest attention: the three days when the moon is dark, and we see no light. In the middle of those three days, the moon steps into the shift moment, the birth of the new lunar cycle. That moment is called the New Moon.

April makes it easy to recognize the New Moon, because she gives the exact degree of both the new and full moon on a sidebar of each lunar cycle.

The moon just completed her three days of darkness, and birthed a New Moon at 28 degrees and 25 arc minutes in the sign of Taurus at 11:53 am Eastern last Friday, May 19.

To help me tune into the possibilities alive in this moment, I turn to the Chandra for that specific degree in Inside Degrees by Ellias Lonsdale. Although the Chandra symbol and wording for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac are quite mysterious and often opaque, I sit with them in deep soul reading and deep soul writing and take them into my dreamtime. And without fail, they feed me. Sometimes in ways I perceive, often in more subtle ways.

Thanks to April and Emma, I’ve now tracked my life on the moon calendar and fed my soul with Chandra oracle wisdom for 4 years. It's a bit like having the Oracle at Delphi in my house.

When I read the Chandra for this New Moon, I laughed out loud. Joy spilled over. And I knew that the best gift I could give you on this beautiful Sunday is this wild mystical message. I want you to know that what you feel is real. And possible.

That wonder. That joy. That crazy burst of creativity. That new idea. That radical desire to do something different. To go deeper. To break away from the constraints of the culture. To laugh. To sing. To dance under the moon and sing with the sun.

THAT feeling. That feeling is real. It is magic. And it has the power to create a life you will relish.

I’m in that wild creative vortex right now. Every day for the past two weeks, I’ve been receiving inklings of what’s to come. What wants to be created. What wants to be created to end the vise grip of patriarchy. To re-sanctify the sacred title witch. To finally stop talking about Her Garden of Reverence and open the gate and BECOME the Garden.

I’ve been doodling, having wild dreams, and circling words that feel like they are part of a new story. I’ve been capturing everything in soul writing waiting for the big picture to emerge. And then I lived through the richest three days of darkness I’ve ever experienced. On Friday I received my magic seed and on Saturday I planted it.

I went into these three dark days thinking my idea wasn’t possible. It’s too big. Too much. Too long. Too wild. But reading this Chandra, I knew I not only could do it, it’s mine to do. So I gave the only answer I could: YES!

Here you go. Read this with joy. Invite the magic seed to jump in your own hand. Then plant it. Plant it in your womb, your belly, your heart, your life. Plant it and watch what grows.

Taurus 29
A man amuses himself by drawing strange shapes.

Crystalized imagination. The inside of the inside remembered and evoked whimsically. There is no form, no pattern, no binding reality. Dreaming the world into being from a greatly bemused stance—other. Twinkling observer-witness consciousness. Off on tangents that call, a life, a cycle, a realm set aside for inventive play without boundaries. You feel exultant in the freedom. Swept away beautifully. Answerable to nobody and nothing except the muse.

to planting your magic seed with a joyous YES

Janet

PS: Watch for next Sunday's Notes from the Field opening the first Birthday sale in two years.

And perhaps the first tidbits about the biggest thing I've ever created!

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