new moon
4 minute read
It's a strange thing to consider, the days before the Internet when printed text and word of mouth were the prime sources of information exchange.
Libraries and bookshops were sanctuaries during that time, but they weren't exclusive. Waiting rooms and cafés were also sources of freely accessible reading material.
The specific Café I am thinking of was attached to a railway station, but it's probably not the sort of railway station you are imagining. The structure was less than 150 years old; large, colonial and wooden. It was painted blue in honour of the ocean outside its glass-panelled doors. Through the windows, the view stretched off for five and a half thousand miles before landfall.
The coffee was exceptional, the proprietors jovial, and the magazine collection eclectic. It was there that I first learned a deeper knowledge about the cycles of the moon.
One of the things about being self-employed I found challenging was routine. Overworking or underworking seemed to be a problem. As my eyes drank in the article I realised that there was a calendar at work in our own little corner of the universe that was regulating a cycle attuned to the expression of life that could be tapped into.
I was, of course, already familiar with the moon. I already knew that it waxed and waned between full and new. That it inpired wolves to howl, romance to blossum, and lunatics to be themselves.
Our relationship to this cycle is ancient, and its symbol infused into the fabric of every culture. Where the apparent motions of the sun mark a day, the cycle of the moon marks a month. Where the Sun is inclined to interpretations of the masculine, the moon is often correlated to the cycles of the feminine. The effects of the moon on the tides are clear, be they those of the world or the body. It told us went to plant, when to mate, when to hunt, when to dream, when to harvest, and when to dance.
The article in the magazine explained that this the structure could be broken down into eight stages, stages that, like so many other natural cycles corresponded to the cycle of life. Where the full moon represented completion and a fullness, the new moon contained potential. The article went into far more detail about each phase; when to dream, when to plan, when to build, when to nourish, when to harvest, and when to rest.
So I tried it, and far more often the not, it worked. If ever I felt lost within a project, overwhelmed or uncertain about what to do next, or simply how to structure a project, I used the principles of the lunar cycle and applied them.
Those of you who joined me for the Moon Meets I used to run will know what's coming next.
