New Moon: "the Sea will hold you"

I want to write to you because I miss you, and I wonder if you are feeling the sense of spinning, of lostness—with glimpses of foundness—that has been my companion these last few months. I’ve been wondering if you too are melting and finding shrapnel buried in the ooze, and courage at your core.

I have no doubt that your life is changing too—inside or out—and I wonder whether you feel in charge of that change, or surrendered to it, or somewhere else… when I began writing the first draft of this post, I felt somewhere else. Now it has been a few more days and more upheaval has, is coming, in more waves, and there is something more like surrender there…and this surrender does not feel passive. It feels like it is anchoring me to the only thing that is steady in my world right now: my soul. Without the upheaval I might not even be able to feel that place.

As I’ve been watching this New Moon coming, I have wanted to write you and ask you how the world is shape shifting you right now. And I have wanted to write you because it feeds something steady in me, and that steadiness is hungry.

During much of this season of 2022, I have had the sense that I am trying to stand up in the surf, to gain my ground, to find land, to make a choice. And each time, a wave knocks me down, an undertow pulls me beneath the surface. It is taking me some time and practice to learn to do something different, something besides quickly standing up again, coming to the surface gasping for breath. It is taking me time to find an anchor in a place where I can’t feel the bottom, a place where I do not yet know how to breath. Is it OK to let myself be taken out to sea? How hard am I supposed to fight for what I think I want? For who I think I am anyway? Have I completely lost my way?  Or is that the path that I have been following is just now swallowed by the Sea. I cannot go back to the before place—the land I came from looks farther and farther away… Amidst these churning questions in the dark I remember a poem someone gifted me when I was pregnant, and we were together on the Awapa Plateau, learning to court the Beloved.

First Lesson 

Lie back daughter, let your head

be tipped back in the cup of my hand.

Gently, and I will hold you. Spread

your arms wide, lie out on the stream

and look high at the gulls. A dead-

man's float is face down. You will dive

and swim soon enough where this tidewater

ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe

me, when you tire on the long thrash

to your island, lie up, and survive.

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

—Phillip Booth

So then, how do I let the sea hold me? How do I allow myself to be vulnerable enough to open my arms and my heart to whatever comes? How do we gain the courage to lie back and stop thrashing, to enjoy stillness and to ride the storm?

In a therapy session a few weeks ago, I had a vision of a simple ritual I was to perform. The ritual was tied to the transformation of shame. The vision didn’t include the “why” of what I was to do, or the process behind it. It was simply the knowing that I was to bring it from the imaginal place to this physical reality, and that this would help.

Sometimes when I go to perform a ritual where the outcome is somehow tied to wanting to “feel better”…to have more courage or self-worth or some self-helpy thing on the other side, I delay because I feel bad. I feel scared. I am sick. I feel the very thing I want the ritual to help me embody and transform. Of course. And perhaps this feeling is actually described best as smallness. Part of me expects that I must go to ritual feeling big for the effect to feel big. That it is in fact a performance. So if I am feeling small, I often procrastinate, waiting to feel bigger, waiting for something to give me permission to take up space so that the Unseen world will see me. I want the Sea to settle, to give me a break first… but that’s not happening. And a ritual can be performed, but it can also be created, and creation can start with almost nothing.

But if I go gently, as the poem suggests, I can go to the ritual feeling small with seemingly nothing to give, except to try to be present to what is asked, to follow the instructions that come without blocking them, without questioning them, without understanding the why of them. Understanding only that I know to do this, there is a deep, committed knowing to that, even though it feels mundane in a way. And there is creation—the bringing of dreams to physical reality.

Somehow through the ritual, I am more ready for the next wave. When the storm comes, I find that I can take a few breaths under water and survive.

During this intention setting and hidden time of the moon cycle, how can you let your body lie back, surrender? Is there a simple way you are being asked to slow down? Is there a place on the land or a simple 1-step-at-a-time act of creation that can assist with feeling held, feeling anchored to your own soul, sewing your shadow back on.

An encouragement: Annie Bloom, a beloved guide and mentor of mine and many, will be co-leading Awakening the Visionary: Tending the Soul of the World this July. This five-day program will be on enchanted Fishlake Mountain in Utah. I recommend her, and her partner Niles, this Mountain, and this deep work of "tending to the Soul of the World" greatly. We need it. You can read more about this program and their work at their site: Buffalo Dreaming Lodge