First, Happy Solstice to the collective who celebrated yesterday. May the light stretch long and guide us home.
Second, in a new community (because yes, I moved), with familiarity behind me, I had the pleasure of facilitating a robust discussion/workshop, on our human experience and the Moon. More specifically, we discussed the natural reflection the physical world affords us if we find the presence of mind to be aware.
That’s always the trick, isn’t it? To be aware that we’re aware. In this case, we looked at the ability to be present through the lens of the phases of the moon and how/why the ritualization of working with the moon came to be.
We, ardent lovers of the natural world, are not the first to look into a full moon sky and feel the pull to something more. Something sacred. With each day that passes though, we are the first to be as far away from the natural world and her cycles than any who have come before us.
The word that comes to mind is disconnected.
We have become a society that, because we no longer depend on the natural world in ways that many of us can see in our day to day lives, has lost the wisdoms that come with innate connection. When we pause, take a breath and really consider, we begin to see how the natural cycle of the moon (as just a single example) was woven into the very fabric of existence. Something like the naming of each full moon ie we just had June’s Strawberry Moon and are making a steady track toward July’s Buck Moon, gives us a snap shot into the recognition that each moon received and that instead of the full moon being that which we witness once a month, her ritual naming turned it into more of what we might celebrate like a birthday. After all, we only see the Strawberry Moon, Buck Moon, Cold Moon once a year. Thus with each full rising, the moon, tied so closely to the seasonal cycles (makes sense that the Snow Moon is in February and the Corn Moon in September) became the symbol of cyclical moments in time. Each rising became the only time this year to see this moon, and after? We begin the cycle toward seeing it again next year.
The moon naming wasn’t just poetic-it was practical. These cycles spoke of when to sow, when to rest, when to prepare-so the names did too. Nature wasn’t background; it was the guide. This is the wisdom that civilizations before us had no choice but to recognize because their lives were dependent on working within the cycles of a land that only by their understanding of it, kept them alive.
It could just as easily have killed them.
Ancient peoples had a respect that those of us with stocked kitchens and shelter from storms haven’t been forced to honor. But as the connections to the earth slip like sand through our fingers, might we lose something else too? Something more personal than just the understanding of the earth, but also an understanding of ourselves? An understanding how we too might be guided by the rhythm of something bigger? An understanding of how we too might take each moon, each phase during each month even, and let it illuminate our understanding of ourselves?
This is the sacred wisdom, the sacred connection we can find ourselves starved for in a disconnected society.
Connection to the natural world, connection to ourselves, connection to each other.
Some of us find our way to this profound grounding path through four-leggeds. I myself have lived a lifetime as an equestrian and credit my inner understandings to the horses that began teaching me at age seven. Their energetic resonance, the majesty of their being, the requirement that I consciously manage my energies and that what I cannot see, meets them before we ever physically connect were understandings that I took as fact as a child. It wasn’t until I had lived more than a few of my own cycle years that I began to see the sequential rhythms that took the horses through one movement to the next. The stillness in between. And I was older still, until I realized that those natural rhythms weren’t readily recognized by the two legged portion of our society.
But understand, we once looked to the hooves of deer, the patterns of bird migration and the timing of the moon to know what time it was in the world and within ourselves. There were no glowing screens telling us the the day, the time, five minutes until our next meeting. There was a time when we didn’t keep a calendar, but we kept stories.
Stories that told of our connections.
We told of the wolves howling outside the circle of firelight beneath the Wolf Moon when hunger rang deep-not just for humans, but for all. And that reminded us of scarcity, of community, of survival. We spoke of the Strawberry moon-not in spreadsheets or harvest reports but in tales of berries gathered by children, of sweetness after labor and the first fruits of summer gifted from the earth. We felt the cold of the Cold Moon when elders’ breath fogged in the frost as they whispered tales by firelight. Stories of snow silence, of bone and breath and waiting for light to return. And in these stories we learned how the moon was not just a phase-but a chapter. A turning page in the sacred text of seasons.
And before the moon? I like to think we watched the animals. They are the ones who knew when to migrate, when to nest, when to go within like the bear or shed like the snake. To follow the prints of the deer on the hidden path home.
And now? Who guides us home? How do we find our way?
One word: Ritual.
Ritualization is the art of our remembering. It is a whisper to the Strawberry Moon not because it’s quaint, but because it’s connective. That whisper is the thread that we pull from the present summer’s day to the same day from all the summers before. To the hands that once harvested, to the mouths that once told the stories, that were our teachings under the Strawberry Moon’s same silver light.
Ritual is active remembrance. It is the conscious act of moving from information to integration. And it doesn’t have to be elaborate so much as rich with intent. A word to the moon, a breath under the open sky, a stone in the windowsill. A prayer.
These acts are alters. They are the church from which we ask to be shown the way. Ritualization is the rethreading of ourselves back into the fabric from which we’ve slipped. Not to recreate the past, but to reawaken a presence-a rhythm-that’s still very much alive, waiting just beyond the white-noise for us to sift through and hear again.
This is how we find our way. One moon, one moment, one remembered story at a time. Ritualizing is just remembering. But it’s remembering that we’re remembering that’s the key.
And as we place the key in our inner locks and turn them, I wonder, what is it that we remember?
