New Moon Rosh Hashana & Eclipse of the Soul

New Moon Rosh Hashana & Eclipse of the Soul
Wednesday, September 8, 2010

by Amy Martin

We are walking into darkness, ebbing toward winter, exhaling before we take a Solstice pause and begin breathing again into spring’s light. Shadows grow long, in nature and in our hearts. For the past several months, we have heard mostly the sound of summer running. It is now time to listen to the sounds of our souls, to hear the silence as well as the noise.

Rosh Hashana

At sunset today begins Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year. The next New Moon is Samhain, when the Celts set forth their year. It’s a calendar cycle fashioned after the growing plant. An oak sapling begins the moment the acorn falls from the tree in autumn. Winds and rains push the acorn deeper into the soil. Now covered in the dirt and dark, it gestates until the spring, unfurling and branching into the light to grow, produce and then decline. And so does the Celtic and Jewish year. At this time of season when we are walking into darkness, into that risky gestation and birth, the wise get ready, look for clarity and grace.

Rosh Hashana begins 10 days of atonement, an annual clearing of the karmic books, a time of conscience, to right wrongs and make amends, starting the year with a fresh slate. We extend kindnesses to the powerless and underprivileged, challenging the illusion of separation that they are different from us. We consider our food, those that give their lives so we may eat. Atonement. At-one-ment. An invitation arises in each of these days to spend time making real in your mind the highest good of the upcoming year, the kind of life you want to lead, kind of soul you want to be. Atonement time concludes in Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days. This year Rosh Hashana coincides with the end of Ramadan, the holiest month in Muslim calendar when followers fast from sunrise to sunset and devote themselves to acts of charity.

New Moon

When you woke up this morning, you woke up to a new day, a New Moon, a new life. New Moons signal the beginning of Ramadan and Rosh Hashana and the New Moon is exact today at 5:30 am. A New Moon is a promise, a beginning, a start. For three days she is invisible, unseen in sky, lost in the brilliant solar corona, the Sun and Moon conjunct in the sky. A New Moon is the archetype for submission to a larger force and initiation into our own power, just as the Moon undergoes trial by fire, subsuming herself to Sun, only to emerge renewed, a slender crescent in the western sunset sky.

This New Moon, falling in the sign of Virgo, shapes the emphasis of the next four weeks on harvesting our intentions. It is a time to build plans for new visions, of committing to the nurturing of yourself and the Earth. The mutable nature of Virgo asks what you are willing to release to build something greater. An astrologer friend advises: People are more willing to change and transform things at a deeper level – even if it was something they swore they’d never do!


Shadow

Do you let the shadows pursue you? Do you let that which you don’t want to look at, that which you can’t identify, have dominion over you, determining your actions? But, you say, you do yoga every day, have had your charkas aligned, been blessed, sanctified, consecrated, purified, learned from the masters and even taught a few. And yet, there it is, your shadow side, waiting still. Denied, ignored or discredited it only grows, pursuing like the Furies, sending signals and lessons that we so deftly evade. Walk willingly into the darkness this season, journey until you find the center of yourself, the clarity and grace found only there. Embrace the shadow and the core that simply is, and await the return into the light.

peace... Amy/Moonlady

Spring Equinox: Beyond Weather

It’s the first day of spring today, regardless of the temperature. Such ephemeral things as weather don’t determine the seasons. Instead it’s all about the Earth refusing to be upright and rigid. The planet leans and wobbles, tango-ing through the solar system with quite a bit of attitude.

The Reason for the Season

Simply put, Mother Earth is off her rocker, tilted about 24 degrees, spinning like a wobbly top through the cosmos, not quite on the level, right on the edge of being out of control. Sound a bit like your life? But this is a good thing. The axial tilt of the Earth provides its affinity for the iconoclast as well as its seasons. At Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, she’s leaning so much that the Sun is aimed straight at the Tropic of Capricorn, making Capricorn is the first astrological sign of winter, and at Summer Solstice she’s tilted the other way so that the Sun is pointing toward her southern Tropic of Cancer, so the first day in the sign of Cancer is the first day of summer.

Halfway between, the Earth attains a short period of balance. She's almost upright and the Sun stares straight at the equator, hence the equinox. The Sun appears to rise exactly in the east and sets due west. The dark and the light, the day and the night, are equal. We are in balance. Homeostasis for a day.

But think about this: half of the world doesn't have seasons. In the tropics, meaning between the two tropics, it's only summer with wet and dry seasons. Imagine how that affects their mythology; no Demeter there; same with the arctic zones. In the northern and southern hemispheres, we are blessed with seasons that metaphorically embody the cycles of life, these annual reminders of our own mortality, of the need to grasp life and live in the now.


The Egg: the Seasonal Symbol We Share with All

Yet even with the tropics and arctic, we share the renewal archetype of the egg. The egg is potential, the inward consolidation, the preparation needed before growth can begin. It’s the nourishment and protection that young require to have that chance to grow.

Not just a sustaining container that fosters life, the egg is the idea. The egg is about breaking boundaries, coming to the edge, of needing to break out of our shell, to go further, to seek beyond, and pierce the limits of what’s not known, to have the faith in life to press forward. This is the core of spring.

Every egg is both a completion and a beginning. We all come from the cosmic egg, metaphorically. In China, Tien dropped the cosmic egg from heaven onto the primordial waters; in India, Brahma burst forth from a golden egg; and in Eqypt, Ra rode his egg like a chariot. Russia and Europe have beautiful legends about eggs. And in America, here we have the Easter Bunny. Bunny?

Excuse me, a male rabbit passing out eggs? Or least he looks male to me. When it comes to eggs, women have the market cornered. Just where did Mr. Rabbit get those eggs from, a rooster? Ostara, the Saxon goddess of spring, is missing from this image! It’s she who gave the rabbit the eggs. Male rabbits do not make and deliver eggs; they fertilize them. If there's a bachelor male rabbit in this holiday, it needs to be a studly thing, doing what male rabbits do so well, so often and so fast.


The Egg is the Idea

The egg is a female sex cell or gamete. Each one of us here was once an egg. Every woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever have, locked inside her itty bitty ovaries, formed in her body by the time she was four months old in the womb. So you were once an egg in your grandmother’s body. Your grandmother was an egg in her grandmother’s body, and so on.

After puberty, your mother dropped one egg every 28 days and on at least one of those times your father greeted the descending egg with thousands and thousands of tiny and very persistent one-celled sperm. At least one of those fervent hormone-driven guys managed to get through all the layers and layers and get inside, a courtship method that continues as adults.

It’s amazing how small that egg is, as small as one cell, one invisible to the naked eye cell, together with the one-celled male sperm, create the incredibly complex unit we are now. And although we are composed of trillions of specialized cells, we arise from two things: the receiving yin of the egg, and the pursuant yang impulse of the sperm.

Women drop eggs every 4 weeks, the same cycle as the Moon; it's that time of Moon, not time of month. If not greeted by its welcoming committee of eager sperm, the eggs go on their lonely way. What takes a year to manifest in the seasons, and what takes men a lifetime to pass through, women reenact the cycle of birth, death and rebirth every Moon, all because of a dropping egg.


Abundance in Life and Death

The next thing is key. Not every egg becomes an animal, not every seed grows into a plant. Most human conceptions begin with multiple eggs being fertilized; you were probably once part of a twin or triplet. Plants make far more seeds, berries and fruits than they need to reproduce, and more than the birds, bugs and animals could ever eat. Instead most decay and become nourishment for the next round. The Earth churns out life in abundance because reckless fertility is what it does and why it exists.

So celebrate this fertile force with a chocolate egg, a totally appropriate sacrament in this talk of life and death, for many of us are grateful that chocolate, along with a fine dinner and wine, got our mothers in the mood. Eat your egg, allowing it to melt slowly in your mouth, and accept being part of the cycle of life in all its risks and rewards, all its gains and all its losses, and feel in the flow of spring.

GUERRILLA RITUAL: Olympics’ Opening and Closing Ceremonies

When the Olympics kick off on February 12, sit back and enjoy the spectacle of guerrilla ritual, the kind you sneak on people by promising entertainment and delivering transformation instead. Nowhere does it thrive in such a public way as the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. Sure, they’re show-biz spectacles set in immense stadiums, with stupendous sets, gigantic props and casts of thousands.

But at their core are approaches unchanged in thousands of years. Drumming, dancing and moving in unison; gathering in circles; making pilgrimages — these elements of ritual transcend language, for in our infant years as a species we had none. They connect us to our roots as humans and fill a need overlooked in modern society — to remember who we are and where we came from.

As something that strikes a primal chord, drumming is a ceremonial staple. In the 2002 Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City, dozens of Native American drummers made a joyful noise while hundreds of tribe members moved around them in procession, chanting with great resolute voices. But it wasn’t just a performance. It was intended as a blessing to all who gazed and listened, each fluttering ribbon on their costumes a prayer for peace. Similarly, Chinese drumming is ritual drumming, always performed with specific intent on auspicious instruments. In 2008 Beijing, a plethora of giant Chinese drums carved from immense tree trunks was on parade.

We can appreciate the ceremonies’ cast-of-thousands spectacles for their grand-scale synchronization and technical wizardry. And while being visually dazzled we may not consciously notice the metaphors they convey: how art and expression are as elemental to our lives as competition, how interconnecting paths weave the tapestry of life, how many can come together to create something greater than the individual parts. But the brain recognizes ritual as embodied metaphor and soaks it all in.

Guerrilla ritual extends beyond the opening ceremony. Every athlete who competes in the Olympics is making a ritual pilgrimage to the site, leaving home and taking a journey in which they hope to transcend all personal limitations, much as the classic hero. In the opening ceremonies, the country-by-country parade of athletes, so often seen as a display of national and ethnic pride, is actually the last leg of their journey prior to the extreme test that is so often a part of the pilgrimage process. These converging paths of athletes coming to a central place weaves a web that although unseen is deeply felt.

Igniting the Olympic cauldron, formerly a simple act, has swelled into a torch relay race over thousands of miles, involving legions of people and lots of celebrities. Again, look past the flash and see the embodied metaphor that makes for powerful ritual: that keeping a vital part of the human spirit alive can come down to just one person willing to reach out to another.

One last time in the closing ceremony, look for the metaphor of how the parade of athletes, now on the first leg of their return pilgrimage home, walk as one unit rather than by nation. And when the cauldron is extinguished in the closing ceremony, notice flashlights and lighters held by thousands and thousands of attendees turning on at the same time, symbolizing how individuals keep a communal flame alive, ensuring that the spirit continues through generations of memory.

Walking into Darkness

It is the twilight of the seasons, when we slip betwixt the worlds of light and dark, day and night, warmth and cold. The Sun rises and set slower in the sky, the days grow shorter and the shadows long. Winter looms. We are at the cusp of darkness and soon there we must walk. It is a passage we hope to come through renewed, a passage not without risk.

“Hold on, hold on, through the darkness, until the dawn.”
~ Starhawk

We shape this seasonal pause into celebration, the public Halloween and the pagan Samhain, Mexico’s Day of the Dead and the Hindu Divali, all festivals of lights and ancestors, all observances of the eternal soul, the radiance within. The holidays occur on or around the New Moon at the end of the harvest season, halfway between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, in the deep and mysterious sign of Scorpio.

"Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too dearly to be fearful of the night."
~ Sarah Williams

More than the waning light and chilling temperatures that bring us cozily together, Divali celebrates the divine light that emanates from within you, that shines from your eyes, radiates from your heart. Here on Earth we make manifest the light, to subjectively perceive our true nature as an expression of the immanent and transcendent reality, the universal Atman, the oneness that makes us whole.

“It’s the blood of the ancients, that flows through our veins,
And the forms pass, but the circle remains the same.”
~ Ellen Klaver

Loss runs like a river through our lives, the shadow companion of our earthly journey. Many are the influences that touch our path – family, friends and fleeting encounters; teachers, leaders and distant heroes. Those that have physically passed on live within us and we pass that influence on to others in an unending chain. In this season of the crone, we especially remember those who lived long lives, seeking their strength and wisdom. Step into the darkening night, speak their names and hear their reply.

“Om, ga-te, ga-te, para ga-te, para sum ga-te, bodhi svaha.”
“Go, go, go beyond, go thoroughly beyond, and establish yourself in enlightenment.”
~ Heart Sutra translated by the Dalai Lama

In these unmoored moments of seasonal twilight, the illusion of time loosens and we slip past the veil to know not only our ancestors, but the oneness of all life. Feel yourself a part of the eternal web of soul spirits. Look to the night sky, the season is right. Reach into the dark, weave your ties tonight.


for Happy Shel Weisman, and Teeny Girl, Max and Flo

Seeds of Abundance

for Autumn Equinox 2009

It was one of those brilliant autumn in days North Texas. The strident summer Sun had mellowed to just the right brightness, yet it was still t-shirt weather warm. The August doldrums had moved off and there was a breeze again. My husband Scooter and I were driving down country roads looking at rural land. Clean green air streamed through the open windows of the car.

Pleasant enough, but even so it was just one cattle farm after another, enlivened only by the dark wash of trees along the creeks and gullies. The constant grazing of cows had tamped down the grasses into obedient shortness, a palatable sameness. The fields were forever juvenile, the grasses never allowed to seed, without potential, without hope, thwarted lives kept in constraint.

REBIRTH

Then we came around a bend to see the sharp vertical plumes of a native prairie grass, brushy bluestem, the rust-colored filaments shining gold in the sunset glow. We had to pull over and stare. Decades ago the landowner planted Bermuda, a tropical grass, on top of the native prairie. The aggressive grass dominated the land, making a monoculture that was good for cows and bad for everything else.

Then the owner went away, and the animals, too. Neglect was all nature needed. The native seeds still remembered, even though it had been 50 years, and the bullish brushy bluestem is always one of the first. Seeds are the memory of plants. From the dark silent rest in the dank soil, bluestem seeds still yearned for their original prairie days, struggling to the surface to pierce the Bermuda and find the light.

We fell in love with the land that day and convinced the absentee landowner to sell. We stripped off the Bermuda cover and replaced it with native grasses and wildflowers. Compared to the surrounding lands, it’s a riot of waist high strappy leaves and fall seed flumes that strive even higher, and rowdy with a variety of life -– birds, butterflies and a myriad of unseen rodents and rabbits. Yet even today, it’s adorned with the yellow autumn blooms of goldenrod, a forb we did not plant, whose seeds languished in the soil until they remembered, too.

SUNLIGHT MADE TANGIBLE

On this planet life is dependent on plants. The greenery here creates most of the air, much of the soil, and anchors the entire food chain. Compared to the huge biomass and energy value of plants, we animals are stowaways. We live on a plant-et. Everywhere but the desert and arctic, plants are busily, rampantly, enthusiastically and luxuriantly procreating. Their sole purpose is to transform the Sun’s endless energy through photosynthesis so that they can grow, mature and cast seeds to the winds.

Seeds. If you went outside and dug up a square inch of soil, put it in a sheltered place and gave it light and moisture, it would sprout from seeds contained in the soil. If you cut down those tiny plants, seeds would sprout again, and again, over and over for 60 years. Only after many decades would the bank of seeds held in that small square of soil be exhausted.

Now that’s abundance. Plants make far more seeds, and berries and fruits, than they need to reproduce, more than the birds and bugs and animals could ever eat. Plants make seeds for the life of it, because reckless fertility is what they do. They concentrate the energy of sunlight and make it tangible in seeds, giving totally without thinking of reward, without possession or attachment to outcome. Plants live to give and give to live. The lesson of plants is clear: creative fertility is the overriding principle of this planet.

MATH, BIOLOGY & SUN

Consider the sunflower, its radiant yellow petals framing a center packed tight with the familiar grey seed. The seeds swirl out in a parabolic spiral, Fermat's spiral. The spiral’s dimensions reflect the Fibonacci numbers sequence, the basis of the golden ratio, a formula of height to depth and width that underlies much of classical painting, sculpture and architecture. Math and light, beauty and biology, all simply to make a seed.

Every seed is both a completion and a beginning. The grasses in my meadow pause at the climax of their process, seed plumes flush in the autumn sun, shining in potential, radiant in maturity, proclaiming a life well lived. Then they release their seeds into the wind, water and soil, confident that whatever may come, however many years may pass, they too will rise to remember the Sun once more.

Summer Solstice Sun

We face the Sun, the warmth caressing our faces carried by particles of photons, vibrating intensely from the heat, that bounce and ricochet off our skin until the photon’s light and heat is exhausted, prostrate on the surface. The sunshine dance.

Streams of photons erupt from the Sun, propelled by solar wind at the speed of light, to dance upon the magnetosphere in aurora borealis glory, filtered through the ozone layer, until 8 and 1/2 minutes later just the right amount of light and heat comes through.

The sunlight heats the oceans, causing the contrast with colder seawater to stir currents that move the mighty oceans. It heats the air so that breezes move from where it’s hot to where it’s not. It warms the soil so that seeds may unfurl, pierce the surface into plants, so that roots may extend downward to the dark. Sunlight equals movement, movement equals life.

The photons shower down upon the plants, whose cells churn with photosynthesis, taking the nuclear immensity of the Sun and breaking it down into the cellular reactions, where it fuels the plants who exude the oxygen that enables us to live, creating in the process more than six times the energy humanity consumes every day.

Feel yourself at this moment as a photosynthesis engine, taking in the energy of the Sun that came to you from 93 million miles away and moving it through yourself to create even more energy, the energy of creativity, the energy of intelligence, the energy of love.

The Prayer Tree of Spring

In my backyard, there is a tree that blooms. When we moved here many years ago, it was lost in the darkness of oaks and cedar elms that grew to tower over it. An odd scrawny tree with tough green skin like a succulent instead of bark, it bore tiny round leaves in sets of three and nasty two-inch thorns. Later we found out it was a trifolate orange tree from China, brought back by the traveling businessman who built the house.

Almost imperceptively it grew, slowly edging around the eave and up toward the sunlight. I fertilized and watered it, took care of it in every way. And it took care of me. My life had shattered and everything seemed lost. Inside the windows overlooking the tree lay my husband recovering from a series of back operations. I held out hope for the tree, hope for us, and waited.

Almost a decade passed. His back healed and my life regained its meaning. One fall, we were surprised to see a few pecan-sized oranges on it, bitter fruit, all seeds and pulp. The next spring we looked for flowers and were rewarded with a few white blossoms the size of a small pea.

But it wasn't until a statue of Kwan Yin was placed beneath its boughs that the tree truly bloomed. The Chinese goddess of compassion sacrificed her place in Shinto heaven in order to feel the pain of earthbound humans and help them to transcend.

On this spring day, flowers bedeck every branch, beckoning of fruit to come. Dozens of colorful ribbons flutter as well, each one tied with prayerful intent by visitors. The Prayer Tree.

Planted in the 1950s, the trifolate orange lived for decades before going through a period of extended darkness. Then in just a day, everything changed. Someone cared. It took years to rebuild, years when it seemed nothing was happening, but the blooms did come. Now it is not only reborn, it is deeply sacred, a living altar to the prayers of humans and a testament to faith in life.

With its thorns and flowers, its history and the people who hope for its peace, the Prayer Tree evokes a quote by Thornton Wilder: "Without your wounds, where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and bumbling children of Earth as can one human being broken in the wheels of living. In love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve."

Spring is the reservoir of hope. Enjoy this season with its abundance of metaphors to live by and have faith in the life force that infuses every leaf, every stone, every grain of soil. At my rural place, the front meadow is an artificial field of Bermuda. The imported grass was overseeded on this piece of blackland prairie over 50 years ago. Until the mid-‘90s, the meadow was pummeled regularly by livestock or cut for hay. Yet through the pale gold straw of last year's bermuda pierces the bronze stalks of bluestem, a native grass that flourished when buffalo grazed the land. For decades the seeds rested in the darkness of the soil. Then one spring, they sprouted.