Where the Living and the Dead Dwell | Autumn Equinox + Harvest Moon

Equinox | Sun enters Libra
Saturday, Sept. 22 | 6:55pm PST

Full Harvest Moon in Aries | Monday, Sept. 24, 2018
1 degree | 7:52pm PST

Libra season begins tonight, Saturday September 22. As the Sun enters the sign of the scales, the Autumn Equinox occurs and we witness the luminaries good-heartedly share equally of the day’s 24 hours. Total equilibrium, this fleeting bliss, is today’s gift.

The Harvest Moon will quickly follow Equinox, and as Luna rises full on Monday evening, she’ll light up a dark sky whose night now claims more hours than the day. The Sun has passed the torch off to the Moon, as the Sun (our projective, externalized selves) seeks more and more time each day behind the veil, where he gestates a new Self to be born with the vernal Equinox.

So by this lunation, we’ve entered the dark portion of the year. The only way to serve ourselves fully is to follow suit. The sunless hours invite us into our internal landscapes, to discover the peaks, valleys, coves and caverns where both our living and our dead dwell. As we open the books that have rested on the shelves in the adventurous part of the year, we’ll see what specters file out. In this place our eyes do nothing, and only our hearts know where to go.

A good way to ritualize this transition is with an old Mabon custom: to visit the burial sites of your ancestors, especially female ones. Wine is poured onto the ground as an offering to the wisdom of the aging goddess. But if you can’t go to your ancestors’ literal burial grounds, turn to what you can find of these women’s stories.

We have an opportunity here to give gratitude for our elders but also for what we’ve learned in our own aging processes. The wounds, the battle scars, and precisely how our bodies and souls have responded ask for witness now. The Full Harvest Moon is conjunct self-healing Chiron in Aries, and square mature Saturn in Capricorn, so this Full Moon likes the idea of making a plan to keep working with your personal healing journey as your external self rests. It wants some sort of structure, practice, or intentional space you visit regularly to become part of your life if it isn’t already. And if it is already, it wants you to recommit.

Paul Klee | Blossoms in the Night | 1930 | sourced via paul-klee.org

Whatever you open up through your commitments now, you want it to be manageable, and you also want it to be directly related to healing old patterns. Remember that with the New Moon in Virgo, we made friends with non-linear time and the wisdom of the earth. Now we begin to visit our deep personal pasts, via the flow of energy in our own little bodies. Old wounds and old narratives, ancestral stories, the versions of yourself long gone from the visible world: all are due to visit. For the veil is thin and thinning. Now is the time to face and make offerings to these old ways of being that float through your awareness via memories, unexpected emotions, dreams, etc.

Because as Samhain approaches, these things will only become increasingly real. What we want to do now is remain alive to these strange arrivals, to attend and befriend them rather than fear them. Because the Mars-Uranus square remains activated, it’s likely that trauma or circumstances that have disrupted your system in the past will continue to surface, and old, reactive patterns may become too close for comfort. Keep in mind that when we look to old versions of ourselves (and our ancestors) we have the agency to create a different present. Much of the work is about non-attached observation of what comes up, and the willingness to take the reins down a different path.

Remember also as the nights grow longer that nothing coming from your own depths is inherently evil. Every last bit of it is information trying to help you devise the unique healing technology that is yours to develop, even and especially when it’s information that’s hard to swallow. For poison contains concentrated magical potential. “The dose makes the poison.” Look closely at how your system responded to past poisons, and note how when you put your mind to it, your system no longer has to shield itself so violently against the toxin. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, if you can move past what didn’t kill you. Understanding yourself through negative definition is helpful now. For example: I am not that poison that taught my body how to defend itself, and I can now release the poison from my system.

This Harvest Moon’s conjunction with Chiron suggests that the healing work we’re doing here is about building bridges of several kinds. We’re building bridges between our minds and our bodies through cultivating a better understanding of how we’ve functioned in the world up to this point. We’re building bridges between ourselves and those around us by letting go of defenses that no longer serve us. And we’re building a bridge to a future we can’t know yet because it is radically different from the past. That bridge is built in alignment with love, not fear. It takes steadfastness, and faith.

Remember that Harvest Season is the beginning of a full half of the year. As we harvest the fruits of our spring and summer’s labors, we have quite a bit of time to organize the pantry. Don’t rush to understand what goes where and and how everything will fit in at this moment. As you make commitments to the birth of a new Self, don’t overextend your visions of the future. Let your hands fall open. Libra season does best when we go coolly, so into this night, go gently.

If you’re interested in more insight from Amalia:

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