Full Moon Madness!
or, letting it take you
You smell that?
The madness and the change and the anxiety hum of living on this planet, in this time in history? I’ve been trying to zoom out, get some perspective, but it was the details that saved me during a pretty amplified emotional episode yesterday.
One little Ativan. A dark room with the AC humming. The blanket with croissants on it my mother gave me. The music I heard when I was tripping, playing loud. Cello, steel drums, bass.
I started by going into my body, it was vibrating with fear and shame. My skin itched all over, my face and feet were hot. My thoughts were stabbing me all over with the needles of anxiety.
So then I breathed. I shook all over, on purpose. I asked my fear questions until the tears came. Big, cacophonous sobs. Grief enveloped me and held me like the love it is. The space around the loss and lack I was feeling grew larger, and everything fit therein.
Then I wrote down my top fears and the best and worst possible outcomes. I don’t think I was ever taught this, but maybe I didn’t make it up. Anyway, it was a salve, it smoothed into four walls of a box i could rest in. Safety came. Shame dissolved.
And I rested here for one more song, and then I got up and made lunch.
And then I wrote this for us:
Writing (What’s up with my projects? What’s up with my community and writerly friends’ projects?)
World (A quick-hit on the news and the hopelessness of it / how I plan to be of service lest utterly breakdown).
WooWoo (Witchy shit, astro, tarot, etc.)
Words (A little poem or excerpt I’ve written recently, usually with the above-mentioned writing community)
Wonder (An inquiry: a question for you, dear reader, to consider or comment on in the post).
Oh, we might as well
Writing You will see, pictured below, that I’m having some paralysis about revising my novel for the frillionth time in 9 years, but I have the mag for Litso and Jeremy’s book to begin today. So I’ll start there and put my bullshit on another burner for now.
World I found a wonderful if very sad Substack, which hosts the stories of Palestinian writers; worth checking out, I say.
WooWoo We’re standing before the Lion’s Gate. Alignment of Leo Sun, Sirius (big star, the “spiritual sun”), and Earth. Add to that a microwaved Mercury and a Full moon in Aquarius and it’s no wonder we feel stretched, medievally, in opposite directions.
Good energy for shadow work, and that’s what this fear exercise was, I think:
Also manifestation, creativity, intention-setting. I’ll be working with this energy until the gate closes on the 12th.
I blessed and saged my bed on Friday, and I realized when I finished the stress cycle Saturday afternoon, that’s why it felt so good to just lay there and cry. I was saved, a slate wiped clean.
Words Written at 3am Sunday morning (don’t fret, I went right back to sleep). From Room to Write, the prompt is “Machinations” in which we start by considering a tool…
Consider the notebook
Make it lineless and new
How we carve into it
To see what we’re thinking
Bear claw marks scraped
into smooth beech bark
the giving of trees
And the moonlight that wakes us
So, consider the moon,
as poets often do
Bleaching the branches and backyards
limbs and leaves carving
poetry of their own onto grass
Scalpel, change this body
we're the only animals who choose to
Change--nature seeming to yield
cracking against our hard backs
our ribs and spines
And so we crack the spine of the notebook
and tell ourselves about it
How simply then we close
against the poem from 3am
or open again to the page
asking who we were
at that specific moment
when the moon was so bright
it woke us, and pulled us to write.
Wonder What is it you are you fearing? Can you write some of these down and imagine pleasant outcomes?
Loving you,
Kay