Full Moon in Libra: Remembering Our Artisan Selves

The thread that’s been arriving for me this Full Moon – a thread that speaks to Libra’s love of balance – is this:

“We’ve only been told half the story.”

Not a new idea, but a circling back to it. And always, grief and outrage that in Western culture, what’s been promoted and valued is the ‘yang’ side of the story – the doing, growing, achieving – while the ‘yin’ side of the story – the being, resting, releasing – has been vilified and deliberately obscured.

There is so much we have forgotten. So much we never even had a chance to know. So much lineage and ancestral knowledge that has been very deliberately broken, especially for us as women.

This Libran Full Moon I touch into some of the grief and despair around that…

No wonder that we can end up feeling disoriented, overwhelmed, and extremely susceptible to patriarchal/capitalist cultural messaging which consistently devalues our embodied female experience, so that we end up feeling even more confused and disoriented!

(Image above: Recent art experiments – taking watercolour and acrylic classes at the moment, to feed my Artisan Self!)

VIDEO: REMEMBERING OUR ARTISAN SELVES

But in the spirit of REMEMBERING ourselves and recovering our truth, and under the light of this artistic Moon, I want to pass on a gift that came to me via Jo Kilima of The Darling Tree, based in Brisbane, Australia. (Thankyou so much, Jo!)

It’s a mesmerizingly beautiful video of a two-year process of making the ‘scholar’s four jewels’ of China – Chinese ink stick, writing brush, ink slab and paper.

It’s an ode to the incredible beauty to be found in one’s craft, in the humblest of tools.

It’s a honouring of how making connects us to the wider web in which we belong – to our bodies, to Nature – trees, animals, land – to our culture, and to the long line of ancestors who came before us, and the wisdom and stories they passed on to us (or didn’t).

It’s a deep bow to both the dedication of the creator, who embodies her way in an incredible poiesis, and to the time it takes, always…

It’s a reminder of the invitation from Life, always, to craft our lives, to priestess our lives.

 

We are so hungry for connection.

When we make, when we create, particularly when we faithfully show up to creation regularly, we are reminded that we BELONG, that we are in this deep and ongoing conversation with Life wanting to birth itself through us in beauty.

A PRAYER

So this is my prayer for all of us, this Full Moon, from my artist heart to yours:

May we recover our lost creatrix selves.

May we honour the humblest of our choices and actions as an integral part of this life we are creating, worthy of our attention and esteem.

May we shed the deep inculturation of the ‘consumer’ mentality that obscures even the idea of making for ourselves, with our bodies and our hands.

May we attune to the ancient and insistent song of Creation flowing through our fingers, our wombs, our heart, our need, our history.

May we feel and know ourselves an ecstatic fractal of the Cosmic Artisan birthing Herself in a perfect and everlasting unfolding.

Sigh… so mote it be…

xxx Grace