Each month I map my experiences as they unfold, using the Lunar Journal to help me see the patterns.  Knowing my life is held in the cycle of birth, growth, full bloom, harvest, decay, death and rebirth grounds me, and also alerts me to the opportunities of each day and each season.  

I offer these words in the hope that they help you attune to the cycles unfolding in your own life, and honour what is arising…

New Moon: what is new?
I could feel it brewing for all of the previous cycle, like a train in the distance rolling towards me.  This question: where is home?

This small town in prairie Canada to which we have returned so many times is filled with loving relationships.  With family connections, deep and loyal.  I have been coming here for a third of my life.

I feel the resourcing of this place, at multiple levels, relationally and practically.  At the New Moon, I know myself at the top of the food chain – that’s my lived experience, cruising on a boat on a beautiful lake with family and friends while a glorious sunset paints the sky.  Why wouldn’t I live here?  Why wouldn’t I choose this place for my children, for a time at least?

This is a potent seed.  I feel the power of it.  I choose to share it with others, knowing that in the speaking of it, there is no taking it back.  It will have a life of its own.  It could change my life. 

Crescent Moon: what is emerging and birthing?
If I live here in Canada, specifically here in rural prairie Canada, will there be room for me and my work, my Way?  This has always been my question.  How interesting that half this cycle is devoted to singing the Work here in Canada and seeing what’s possible!

What do the women of Canada need?  How do I find kindred souls?  Where are my sisters here?  What is possible here?  Trusting the process…

First Quarter Moon: what is gaining momentum and growing?
We make a Lammas altar and the women co-create the map of the cycles, at house church, this group of beautiful soul travellers.  So there’s an answer: yes, there is room to bring myself to this small town, to be received, to find our shared resonance…  Perhaps the only limit is my assumptions, in the end, rather than any cultural gap too wide to cross…

I fly out east to Quebec to join Jane and Sequoia.  We ‘take the waters’ at a spa in Montreal, nourishing our bodies with warmth, sisterhood and ideas.

This green, rolling landscape of Quebec is the closest I’ve found to the green rolling hills of the Dandenongs.  It’s lovely to see more of Canada – my soul so nourished by perceiving the world in all her diverse beauty!

Waxing Gibbous Moon: what is increasing and blooming?
We attend Yonifest, a festival unashamedly about birth and all manner of women’s interest and experience, but open to men and children.  Food is partly by donation.  There’s a river to dip one’s feet into.  There’s a skate-ramp and a day care!  It feels like a beautiful vision of how it’s possible to come together, to live together.  I am inspired!

Jane presents a pre-conference workshop on the Shamanic Dimensions of Pregnancy, along with three sessions at the festival.  All are very well received.  There is great interest in the Four Seasons Journey coming to Quebec, multiple offers of venue, names added to a list of very keen sisters!  It’s an exciting affirmation of the work!

We practice our conversational French!  Bits of my high school lessons return.  (And I learn from Jane who has taught the Four Seasons Journey with French women and is planning a French Four Seasons Journey in 2018!)

We attend the Witches ball!  The power of costume and play!  Surely medicine the world needs now!

Just before the Full Moon, I witness Jane, Australian grandmother-midwife, and a Mexican grandmother-midwife, Dreaming together, seeding the possibility of future collaboration, envisioning sanctuary for the great-grandchildren in the face of increasing restriction in regards to childbirth and women’s health, worldwide.

Watching them hug, I have full-body tingles, feeling the ripple of this powerful Full Moon prayer.  Blessed Be!

Full Moon: what intensity is to be embraced?
It’s a breather between Yonifest and the upcoming circles in the US.  By day, we work, rippling our personal medicine out into the world in the form of emails, newsletters, personal projects.

And by night, we Dream into what the world needs now, and how the School of Shamanic Womancraft can play her part.

So many ideas, notebooks filling.  We have travelled forwards in time, from Imbolc to Lammas, from early Spring to early Autumn.  It’s like getting a sneak peek at the harvest, and being able to nurture the Spring seeds with this information, tweak their growing environment so they can thrive.

Disseminating Moon: what harvest is to be celebrated?
We are detained at the US border.  I learn that the magic word is ‘menstruation,’ mention it three times and it seems to work like ‘open sesame’!

We sit in circle with women from the green mountains of Vermont, blessed by Pippa’s hospitality.  Pippa held the vision of Jane coming, and made it manifest – this is what’s possible for all of us, when we Dream deep and strong.  We can call people from the other side of the world, from other times and places – that’s pure magic!

It’s a harvest moon at a harvest time of year in this hemisphere, but this is definitely seeding work, the patient work of the farmer scattering grain, trusting the process.

Third Quarter Moon: what change is called for?

I arrive back home under a harvest phase moon, bringing with me all the ways I have been expanded and inspired.  If we are living the dystopia, we’d better get on with the dreaming and implementation of some life-giving alternatives.  I’ve come home with a vision, galvanized.

And I run straight into porn, this thread that has woven always through my relationship with my man.  This is a painful harvest, a disorienting discovery that the landscape had shifted once again, a familiar experience.

I have no framework for ‘what is healthy porn?’, if there is such a thing.  How can I be fully invested in this work of women’s healing and empowerment, and come home to this?

It’s a gap, for sure.  A strong inner dissonance.  I want to bridge it with my mind.  I want to make room for my man without compromising myself.  I want to find a way to make it all make sense, but I keep running in to brick walls.

(This wrestle led me to a big New Moon seed – see here!)

Balsamic Moon: what is to be released?
I pack up, getting ready to leave Canada.  My family will stay on for three more weeks.

I finish a crocheted blanket for my mother-in-law, deeply woven with love and the stories of all the women Sequoia and I sat with in circle (Sequoia helped me finish it, total legend, never would have gotten it done otherwise!  Thankyou, dear heart!!).  I am reminded of our power, as women, as human, to soul-craft objects that call us deeply into love and honour.

I am deep in my defense mechanism of withdrawal about the porn stuff and the secrecy, and yet in the intensity, invited deeply into the space of lovers, of soul-brother and soul-sister travelling together this lifetime, perfectly matched to grow each other in this crucible called marriage.  Our process is trust-worthy, entirely Chironic.

I fly home, entering once again that liminal space of travel, and how it opens my mind.  Truly, I am a witch, moving between worlds. 

I land in Melbourne on a most glorious Spring day, the air crisp, the sun warm.  I walk the suburban streets near my parents’ house, in a rapture at being alive, and feeling the love of family and friends here.  So very very blessed to be immersed in love that spans the globe…  so privileged…

Dark Moon: what waiting and resting is necessary?
I get a massage, my body needs tending.  Afterwards my blood comes, on this Dark Moon.  I am rarely aligned, in terms of menstrual and lunar cycles, so this feels special.

I bled the day after arriving in Canada, and I bled the day after arriving back in Melbourne.  Both these places are home to me.   With new eyes, I see the deep beauty of this place.

I am grateful for blood with which to make blood prayers at this powerful Solar Eclipse.  Prayers I hope will outlive me.

I let go of the fear that I am not capable, strong or resourced enough to teach.
I let go of the fear that if I face masculine sexuality with an open heart and mind, I will lose something important to me.
I let go of leaving things to the last minute.

At home, I am deep in Dreaming, feeling out how the Lunar Affirmations want to unfold, listening to prayers tumble onto the page. 

Wilderness Solo looms.  In a few days, I drive up north for this sacred ritual, this deep bush magic.  Women spending three days and three nights alone in the wilderness, listening with heart, soul and body.  There is much to be done, but also a need to rest this jet-lagged body.  Under this Solar Eclipse, I feel open and still, and also aflame.  I honour this pivotal moment.

Blessed Be!