Earth Moon 2024

Every lunar cycle brings with it teachings, challenges, embraces, inspirations, and imaginings. By now I am practiced at attuning myself the the rhythm and the practices that I have assigned myself for each phase are becoming intuitive. 

I pull a card for the New Moon–here The World, the last card of the Major Arcana. It speaks to the experience in life where endings become beginnings. An artwork by El Anastui by the very same name, The World, speaks of this too. “Breaking is not a destruction but a necessity for reforming” he says. With this in mind on my first quarter walk, joined this cycle by my sister and young nephew, we went to the woods in search of the Redwood, who towers over the ancient canopy of Bysingwoods. This tree speaks of ends and beginnings–brought in by colonization, planted in the ancient forest, and now changing it’s makeup. It is no longer possible to move though the world ignorant to what the colonial western project has wrought–endings and beginnings. 

Together with the wisdom of El Anatsui, staying with the reforming that happens when ecosystems collide, I am present to the sacrament of it all. Life and death are so fundamental, and still so epic, they who work in the mediums of fragmentation and reforming, artists, for one, must be, by nature, magicians. 

During the Full Moon in Scorpio I traveled through London in search of the ancient trees who live there. I noticed what it was to stand in their presence and consider all the endings and beginnings they have seen. The Totterage Yew, said to be between 1000 to 2000 years old has seen many empires come and go. If she was indeed 2000 years old she was planted by the Celts, maybe even a druid, on the cusp of the Roman invasion of Britain. She saw the Romans come and go, the Anglo Saxons do the same. She was present when William the Conqueror “concord” Britain and then watched as Britain became an empire, out competing other western monarchies for their national dominance to enslave and colonize around the globe and grow rich from the exploitation of land and people. The Yew knew that the time will come for that empire to also fall. She knows this still for all she sees today.

These trees, these “Ancient Ones” have seen so much. Their wisened roots reach deep into the earth and hold such a storehouse of experience. This longevity, this wisdom of time, hundreds and thousands of years in scale is beautiful. Just to be in their presence and to hold in my mind some small fraction of that perspective was enough to be in touch with a yearning to learn from them. 

This Earth Moon cycle, I wish for the perspective of trees.