SPRINGING, BEGINNING, AGAIN
new moon musings
Hello sweet friends and happy new moon to you. I write to you from within a time of big emergence--tree leaves are emerging, flowers are emerging, green emerges on the mountain more every day, seedlings emerge from their seed casings--Spring can be such a vivid, glorious time! I am feeling overjoyed at the sight of bright green new leaves coming in to the canopy. And yet I also notice how quickly emergence becomes emergency, urgency, we can get swept away in the increasing flowing energy that is pushing up all around us. And still, it is possible to be flexibly rooted within the flow, like the Willow and Birch trees who grow within the flowing water at the river. At this new moon I invite us all to take a big deep breath, a big exhale, and feel into the space the new moon makes in the sky, the empty space, the open space. Let’s remember the space our breaths create in our bodies. Let’s sit for a moment, in the endless present moment. Sometimes all Spring needs us to do to be with it is just to sit out in it all. Nothing to do. Just sitting and being. Giving in, giving over, lovingly letting go. Truly, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how the frenetic energy transforms from just sitting in the yard this time of year.
New moon, beginning again, I am beginning again and again all the time these days. It is currently my number one reminder to myself, to begin again. This is the third time I’ve begun this newsletter, and this time I begin again with a small cup of tea (Four Seasons Spring oolong), and I find that the third time’s the charm.
I got distracted by the name of my tea and looking it up. And so I begin again. AGAIN!
Another place I find myself beginning again is in the garden. I am trying to recalibrate my rhythms to avoid my usual summer burnout where I let the garden go entirely and it becomes a wild tangle. This year I’ve noticed that there’s a very important moment happening right now. At this point in Spring the garden is starting to really take off and grow itself, perennials are in their full return, weeds have hit a stride, and if I don’t get in there and get working on it, I will soon have a very full garden that I feel overwhelmed by. So I’ve been going out in the evenings, when the light is so sweet and warm colored, and making space in the beds by pulling grasses, and adding deeper mulch, and sowing seeds here and there, and admiring the flowers and buds and leaves, and watering my little seedlings. Last year I hardly watered at all, we had a very rainy early Spring, and I notice I go through cycles with how much effort I want to put into the garden, so some years I don’t water at all and the plants still grow, and some years I remember that the plants will grow extra good if I add water consistently. (O, consistency! A note on personal consistency, and also on giving ourselves a little space, I like to think of consistency on longer time scales. Do I practice yoga every day? No. Have I been practicing yoga for over 11 years? Yes! Longer time scales give us the chance to see the wider spirals and rhythms that can affirm our consistency and help us ease up on the achievement/discipline pressure that can be so tiresome.) Thank you to these mountains with bellies full of water for giving water to my garden! I am feeling so soothed and supported by these mountains lately, feeling so thankful for looking out and seeing such vast swaths of color from the pastures up the mountains into the sky. I am so glad to be immersed in such color.
Beginning again, I have been reminded lately of the Claude Cahun quote that I have mentioned here before: “Under this mask, another mask! I will never be done removing all these faces.” The journeying of the self spirals on and on. Discovery of one level opens me up to another unknown, and at first I think I want to be done finding out, but I know that the cycle is simply to begin again. I have been re-reading Be Here Now and this stuck out to me: “The lions guarding the gates of the temples get fiercer as you proceed towards each inner temple but of course the light is brighter also, it all becomes more intense because of the additional energy involved at each stage of sadhana.” The imagery of the lions guarding the gates of the inner temples reminded me of the imagery of my tarot card for the year, Strength. A person calms a lion in this card, quite a fiery looking lion if you ask me, and I think of calming the lions at the gates, proceeding on and on, the strength required and gained each time. A subtle strength, a loving strength, an inner calm strength. A slowing down strength.
I slowed down the other day in a group sit with Chelsea and noticed that when I try to grab hold of my thoughts—squeeze them tight, direct everything I have onto them, hold them tight and fast—they slip through my fingers. I was amused by this, there’s something really interesting there.
Another lion I am communing with, something else I’ve been finding interesting, is framing miscarriage as a natural part of the pregnancy/birth process. I haven’t felt secretive about my individual experience but I do feel like there’s a gap in the storymaking about the process of pregnancy and birth. If miscarriage was a more normal and less scary part of that storymaking, would I have been less shocked when it happened to me? A lot of the difficulty in my first experience was related to the shock and surprise at the outcome. The second time around, I felt really different about it because I wasn’t surprised. And if our bodies and bodily experiences weren’t so intensely moralized by politic and religion, how would miscarriage feel? Would it still be a loss? What kind of loss would it be? What kind of experience would it be for each individual if the storying about it all began in an accepting place and not a secretive avoidant place?
Two more emergences, and a haiku, and a song, and then I’ll be signing off:
Springing
wild, recklessly
intentional and certain.
beginning again
With love,
XOXO Katelyn
Xoxo