Tonight is the first full moon of 2017 – a warm and unseasonably balmy night, even for January in Texas. I don’t really feel like writing, at least not much here – but I do feel like sharing, just a little bit, the ephemeral bits of words and images that are speaking to me in this moment. Marking the beginnings of things, and the endings of others.

I sit at my kitchen table with the window open, a candle burning, blessed with dried hawthorn blossoms my sister-friend gave me for my birthday. Wearing the little medal strung on thread with an aventurine bead she also gifted: “Our Lady of Prompt Succor, pray for us.” Both aventurine and hawthorn aid in heart-healing.

An ambulance goes by, my white wolf-dog friend Snowy howls from across the street. Full Wolf Moon, tonight is. The air smells lakey, a stagnant huff that rises up from the banks of the river some nights. I’m surrounded by vases of birthday flowers that also perhaps need their water changed. Hothouse blooms and standing water.

I sit, and write, and savor my solitude. Licking my wounds. Any kind of romantic love feels completely shut down for me now, in so many ways. I’ve gone dormant again. Hibernation, a stasis – gestating something hidden deep within, all that is my own. A seed pod, dried up and put away in a dark drawer. The shell around the tender sprout. Exoskeleton, armor, carapace, thorny encasement. Waiting for another season to burst open, when the ground is less hard and cold.

A moon opposition Saturn transit, bringing betrayal, heartbreak, alienation. Learning how to care for myself in the midst of all that mess. When I remember love, being touched in that way, my eyes clench shut, wanting to block it away. The memories searing, cauterized, scarred over.

Today, receiving a massage: unfamiliar warm hands on my stomach, my hips. There are pale scars there, faded: three, over my one ovary and the ghost of the other, and bisecting my navel. Not very many people have ever seen them. There was someone who once knew them very well. It had been a long time since anyone else really touched me there, with calm intention. I froze up, my feet wiggling to dispel the tension like little crab legs, pincers waving. An armored bodice over my soft underbelly. Breathing to relax, to receive touch again where it’s safe. Trying to heal heal heal. Full moon in Cancer lessons.

I don’t have the open-hearted trust that I used to. Loyal like a dog, smiling and panting and returning over and over again no matter how badly treated. Until now. One day the walls will come down again, for someone worthy, someone brave and determined enough to push through, find the treasure on the other side. Perhaps. Or, if not – it just doesn’t feel like such a tragedy any longer.

Until then, battalions and pennants waving, lioness rampant, protective, guarding the secret garden and the fountain at the heart of the fortress, the castle, my body a forbidden palace. In turns guarded and totally vulnerable – the moat around me, the briars that have tangled up sharp and thick. I can be happy here. Fresh water pushes up through the cracks, flowing again, chasing away the stagnancy, the pointlessness.

Intimacy and self-protection are incompatible, I know this – but for now, I rekindle that with my friends, with my family, with myself. I had a very beautiful and peaceful birthday, and I am extremely grateful for all the good and loyal love in my life.

It feels like enough, more than enough. I don’t need the way I used to. I know how to give to myself, fill up my own cup. Nurturing moon, teaching me how to make a home in myself, nourish my own heart. Tonight, with books and peacock socks and quiet and this sacred Thursday I will give to myself to write and write and write from now on to come back to my own garden, rake up the leaves, sit quietly by the fountain, and plant seeds for spring coming. I’ve come to hate winter – loathing the sight of bare dun trees and everything brown and sad. I know even though the air feels like April there is much to be done in this season, and so I’m trying my best to honor it. This is what I’ve got to share.

A little dish of moonlight and maundering from my table.

I receive a poem a day in my inbox, and the one that came to me on my birthday feels like the most perfect gift. Right before I opened it on my birthday morning, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this poem spoke to me especially, like it was written to my heart, and exactly where I am at right now?” And then so it was:

This City
by Eugenia Leigh
could use more seraphs.
Anything with wings, really—
a falcon, a swallowtail.
Ravenous for marvels, I slit open
a chrysalis. Inside,
no caterpillar mid-morph.
Only its ghost in a horror of cells.
I pinch the luminous mash
of imaginal discs
and shudder, imagining
the mechanics of disintegration.
The wormy larva—whole,
then whorled. A wonder
it did not die. Even now,
smeared against my skin, it beams
like the angel in the tomb
prepared to proclaim a rising.

Photograph by Marc Steinmetz – SAMPLE CASE
Assorted glass eyes made by 
ocularist Alfred Greiner and his 
father Arnold are used as models 
to determine the individual 
shape a glass eye must have to 
match a patient’s eye hollow.

I’m reading Enchantments – A novel of Rasputin’s daughter and the Romanovs, by Kathryn Harrison who wrote one of my old favorites, Poison. I’ve always been obsessed with Rasputin and the Romanovs, so I’m enjoying delving into this story. The first paragraph struck me, stuck with me, thorny in my chest, remembering that feeling:

The Hole in the Ice
Behold: in the beginning there was everything, just as there is now. The giant slap of a thunderclap and, bang, it’s raining talking snakes.
A greater light to rule the day, a lesser light to rule the night, swarming water and restless air. A man goes down on two knees, a woman opens her thighs, and both hold their breath to listen.

Full Moon In Cancer – Tin Can Forest


Ellen Harding Baker. Solar System Quilt. 1876

Morning Star by Jeff Simpson



Silent Dying by Laura Makabreksu

Iron corset, 16th century, Museo Stibbert, Florence
My friend Olivia Pepper shared a poem from her friend Anis Mojgani recently. The whole piece is incredible, but this section I’m excerpting got deep under my skin:

Translation

3.
Inside the forest inside of me
is a house with a man inside of it.
There are other houses throughout the forest,
which once housed neighbors
neighboring the home of the man.
But they have all moved away
and the man is surrounded
by all these empty houses.
One day a woman moves into one.
She just shows up.
She sends a bird from her window to his, carrying a river stone in its feet.
He sends the bird back with a polished acorn. They send gifts back and forth
until one day she comes over to introduce herself.
They talk and laugh.
She goes back to the house she stays in.
A day or two later she comes back
and again a day or two after that.
Soon they are together every day.
Soon they sing together and cook together
and walk through the woods together.
Soon she stops going home to her house.
They sleep in the same bed.
He paints pictures of her where she has red hair
because he has red paint and she sits still
with a smile like she is watching a secret
form before her. She undresses and he moves
the wet brush across her back.
She sits quietly reading on his couch holding
her ankle in her right hand and then
holding her right hand around his left
Soon it is her couch too.
She has trouble falling asleep,
she kicks her legs restlessly.
He has trouble staying asleep,
waking up gasping for air.
Their arms find each other. The owls circle
silently. One day she is gone.
And once more it is just the man in the middle
of this forest of abandoned houses.
He sits with a stack of firewood and matches,
wondering which houses
are worth burning to the ground,
wondering if any of them are, and if so,
if his house should also burn.

by Anis Mojgani



All images here are credited where provenance could be found and credit given. If you know the source of an image I failed to find, I’d be grateful for the proper information – thank you.

Helpful insights from Aepril’s Astrology/Tarot Jan 13-19. Energy push-pull.
Happy full moon, lovers. Take care of your hearts.

Many moons of yore:
☾ UP FROM THE DEPTHS – New Moon in Pisces Eclipse
☾ 11.11.15. – NEW MOON IN SCORPIO
☾ Solstice Sisters – New Moon in Capricorn
☾ Wisewoman Honey – New Moon
☾ FULL SNOW MOON – SORROW AND KINDNESS
☾ Cold Winter Moon, Solstice Blue
☾ Summer Solstice – Strawberry Rose Moon
☾ FULL MOON IN SCORPIO
☾ Full Moon in Capricorn
☾ Flammarion’s Firmament
☾ Winter Solstice – Blood Moon
☾ Blue Moon Honey