Week 13--in which we take our first steps in a new Lunar Year guided by a shocking Chandra

Beautiful Ones,

Every year, on the day the New Moon slips into Aries, I stop what I’m doing, study the Chandra for that degree, look around, and pay close attention to what is happening for me and for the world.

I complete this sacred anniversary by writing a short prayer. I call that prayer my Lunar Vow.

I then speak my Lunar Vow aloud every morning as part of my deep soul writing practice until the next new Lunar Year.

Invariably, I do not understand my prayer. As I repeat it day after day, listening to the words coming out of my mouth, I can’t help but notice shifts, changes, surprises. When the lunar year ends, I sit with my prayer one last time and am always surprised at how perfectly that prayer has fed and led and held me even, or especially, through a year filled with tumult and confusion.

I’ve done this Lunar Vow process for over a decade. It is an essential component in my ever-evolving mystical life.

For the first few years, I wrote my lunar vow inspired by the Sabian Symbol for that Aries degree. The Sabian symbols were brought into the world in 1925 by a wheelchair-bound spiritualist-medium, Elise Wheeler, and written down by Marc Edmund Jones. Elise’s symbols were short, evocative, visual images with no explanation or commentary. You had to wrestle with the symbol by yourself.

But then, in September of 2020, Emma Kupu Mitchell introduced me to the Chandra System in Inside Degrees by Ellias Lonsdale.

Ellias received the Chandras (Sanskrit for Light) through his wife after she died of cancer. Ellias and Sara had devoted their lives to astrology and had struggled with the Sabian Symbols. They felt something more was possible. She must have carried that desire into the ethers, because after she died, she began to describe each degree of the zodiac in a complex oracular system that included both evocative visual imagery AND rich commentary.

I fell head over heels in love with the Chandra system and have worked with it to explore the planets and asteroids in my personal chart AND as a guide to understand what the collective is experiencing.

Well, I think we can agree that the collective is experiencing a chaotic swirl of emotions.

As the therapist Tony Caldwell put it:

“In this current time, to be conscious is to be horrified. Your capacity for empathy and compassion far surpass the existence of these qualities in the collective.” He ended with “In a time of collective psychosis, stay human.”

Doesn't that feel like the paradox of the moment?

I want to be conscious, aware, alive. I want to live a human mystic life. And, in the exact same moment, I want to bear witness—I must bear witness. I will not be silent—I must not be silent.

Listen to Elie Wiesel:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the Universe.”

Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, the Accident

So this is where we are right now, as we take our first steps in a New Lunar Year with the New Moon in Aries at 9°. I opened Inside Degrees with excitement and trepidation to read the Chandra that will hold and bless and guide us for the Lunar Year from March 29, 2025 until the next New Moon in Aries on April 17, 2026.

This Chandra is longer than most. And complex. And upsetting. But please sit with it, as I do, reading it slowly once, and then again. And then a few more times.

Let the image and the words touch you.
You do not have to understand it, nor can you. But this is how we are going to live through the next 12 months.

I asked my creative partner, mystic artist, and outrageous oracle, Cathy Stevens Pratt if she had ever painted something that felt like it held the energy of this Chandra. This is what she sent. I recommend staring deeply into her eyes, as you read.

She of the TREES by Cathy Stevens Pratt

Aries 10
(always round up to the next whole number)

Roots of a tree entwined around the statue of a nude woman

Bondage and freedom sometimes go hand in hand.

The bondage is being true to pattern, predictable, caught in habits and tendencies perpetually left to grow like weeds.

The freedom is that as you meet yourself starkly in the midst of these old, tired patterns of behavior, you come into touch with a quickening flame of self-re-creation, stimulated and forced by being at the mercy of the relentless patterns.

This impulse to make yourself over is fervently strong, courageous, ready, and willing.

The old stuff dies hard. You are therefore engaged in a pitched battle of a protracted kind between retrogressive and progressive ideals, impulses, and desires. Both sides are so impassioned and sharply intent that this becomes a knockdown, drag out battle of wills.

The atavistic backward-leaning will feels immune to change.

The visionary forward-thrusting will feels moved by evolutionary forces never to give up.

Eventually the future prevails over the past, but not before scars and multiple traumas mark the spot of fighting for your life against an implacable inward enemy who knows it will lose and fights all the harder accordingly.

_________________________________________

When I read this Chandra for the first time, I whooped with joy. Not because this is pretty. It’s not. But because it is an astonishingly accurate mirror of our world.

You might ask, as I do, how in the world did the spirit of this magnificent woman channel the perfect message for a moment that would arrive years after she died. I don’t have an answer for that. Yet, I know it’s true.

So what do you do now with this cosmic oracle?

Here are a few suggestions:

• Sit with the image, just the visual. What does that visual evoke?
• When you step into the image, are you the tree, the woman, the air, the leaves, the roots, the colors…?
• What words or ideas jump off the page and demand to be seen and heard? And lived?
• How do you feel reading this? Where in your body are those feelings?
• What is the story of this Chandra? Does it change, shift, backtrack, jump forward?
• What does this Chandra evoke? Fear. Hope. Possibility. 
• What in this Chandra is personally true for you?
• What in this Chandra is true for the collective?
• How do you want to begin to work with this Chandra?

And, of course, what kind of prayer wants to become your Lunar Vow?

I don’t have my Lunar Vow for 2025-2026 yet. I will be sitting with this Chandra on Sunday and Monday and perhaps well into next week. I don’t want to rush this. There’s something very important in this message and I will take all the time I need to enter into the Chandra and let the prayer emerge.

That leaves me with one more question to ponder.

• Who will I be on April 17, 2026 when I speak this Lunar Vow for the last time?
• Who will WE be?
• Who could WE be?

to writing and living and becoming a prayer

Janet

website: janetconner.com

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