The height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving on Sunday, the 22nd (exact at 8:01am ET), and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the August 8th new moon are developing. The new moon, guided by its association with Strength, the 6 of Trees, and the Speaker of Trees, invited us to cultivate the strength to sing even in challenging times. Out of the full moon revelation about this developing energy, we are issued an invitation to return a gift to the world in the final weeks of the lunar cycle.  

The exact moment of the moon’s fullness comes in the sign of Aquarius associated with the Tarot’s Star. This is the second full moon associated with the Star—the first on July 23rd was in the earliest moments of our trip through Aquarius and this full moon will be in the very last moments. Our extended encounter with the Star invites us to reach even higher and dig even deeper into the wisdom this archetype offers us.

Since the Shining Tribe Tarot is our inspiration this lunation, The Star figure we encounter is Persephone, the Greek Goddess whose mother Demeter is the Grain Goddess, the giver of Life, and whose husband Hades is the ruler of Death. Persephone is intensely connected to both Life and Death. She cannot choose between them, but instead lives between them by spending part of the year with her mother and the rest with her husband and the dead that she serves as Queen. She is the traveler between the worlds, and as I’ve written extensively elsewhere can even serve as a messenger connecting us living with our beloved dead.

Thursday evening before I went to bed I was contemplating these themes and overnight I had this dream:

I am sitting in a VW Bug, one of the classic 1960s models with two doors. Outside I see a rather gray landscape. Not an immediate storm, but maybe in the aftermath. There is a shadowy figure off in the distance that I am suspicious of. I want to take a nap so to protect myself I have to lock the doors. I depress the lock button on the first door and then test to make sure it has taken hold. It hasn’t. I have to try again and this time I secure the door. I am able to lock the other door, too, and start to drift off to sleep. Still in the dream, I wake up to find one door opening, but it is not anyone to be afraid of. It is my beloved friend Chris who died in June of 2020. She smiles and I smile. 

I was delighted to have this first dream visitation from Chris. I immediately thought of how I had locked the doors, but that didn’t stop her from entering. Fortunately, our beloved dead are persistent in contacting us even when we put up barriers.

Then as I wrote this post and was thinking of Chris, I remembered that she was a healer, a nurse. She worked in the maternity ward ushering new life into the world. An idea washed over me: the dead want to help us to birth new life out of all the death we are experiencing at this time. Having traveled from Life into Death, they know how to make a great transition, to surrender familiar forms like the body, to shape shift into something new. I imagine they see us struggling with the changes we must make to confront the climate crisis, bring an end to war, organize our institutions around empathy instead of power and greed. So they break through the barriers we have set up against them to be with us.

I am inspired by this possibility (regular readers will know it is one I have been feeling and writing about for years now), and then a part of me asks: But what does it mean we should do?!

There certainly is much to do, but to ensure our doing is what is most powerful and centered we might pause in the full moon moments of the Star to receive the wisdom, help, and love of our beloved dead. 

Traditionally, The Star is a card of pausing and simply being open to the grace and gifts of the universe that come freely and equally to all. In the pause, perhaps the energy of the beloved dead will flow through us. In time we might find that we have become conduits for their wisdom on making transitions. Then their wisdom and energy become part of us and guide our action in the living world for change making. We could then be in a new kind of partnership that leads to still barely imagined possibilities.

We could become like Persephone meeting both Life and Death with Love. 

To encourage a revelation on these Star themes, you are invited to one, some, or all of these practices:

• Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the light. (If you live in the Northeast, your moon view most likely will be hidden by a storm. Moon bathe only where you won’t blow or float away! To those in the West, moon bathe where you won’t overheat or burn. I wish we could send you some of our water from the Northeast. Everyone everywhere please be safe!)
• Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has shifted? (If you haven’t done a reading yet, no problem, just do it now under the light of the full moon. You can try the one from the new moon.)
• Bring out your Strength and Star cards from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below, and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.
• Reflect on questions such as: How can I create places of pause in my life for listening to the Greater Than? How can I connect to my beloved dead? What message do they want to give me? How can I be a conduit of Love? How can I help bring new Life into our times of great Death? You could, of course, pull cards as responses to any of these questions. You may want to engage in Visio Divina to find the layers of wisdom within the cards.

When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. In the coming weeks and before the moon returns to dark around September 4th offer your gift to the world.

Taking the Shining Tribe Tarot as our inspiration for the correspondences and guiding wisdom of this moonth (beginning Sunday, the 8th, with the arrival of the new moon exact at 9:50am ET) we find ourselves walking through the forest of the Six of Trees.

I started to write this moontly missive to you early because I am on break from August 5th to the 13th. I thought I would prep and schedule a quick fun note about traveling the moonth with a sense of adventure. The colorful trees and jaunty stride of the person walking through the card fits that meaning—and haven’t we had enough of intensity?

But intensity hasn’t had enough of us. Heat. Fires and floods. Hidden history rising from where some have tried to bury it. The delta variant surging. These are not isolated incidents that we can move through and forget. There is a larger pattern to be seen. And when we do see it, we know we live in times of upheaval and chaos as a society, as a planet—even if we individually get a break every once in a while to recharge ourselves—and how we work with this great change will determine the direction it takes.

That larger perspective is there in the Six of Trees, if we take a closer look. Buried in the land is a snake, the face of an owl, and geometric shapes. Deck creator Rachel Pollack says they are the “forms and symbols of the underworld.” The trees have eyes that seem to be opened in startle. Looking at the world these days is a startling experience.

So despite it being summer vacation time, this new moon reminds us to keep our eyes open to the fullness of life. To see the beauty and adventure while not ignorning the chaos and upheaval. To do that requires a special kind of strength, the kind we see in the Tarot’s Strength card, our path of the moonth.

 In the iconic Rider Waite Smith deck and those decks it inspires, Strength is often a lovely image of a woman bedecked with flowers astride a gentle lion. But the placid image obscures how challenging the work of this archetype actually is. Because we have to stare into the sharp-toothed mouth of the lion to learn how to be with its wild power. We must adjust ourselves to work with the lion—not to beat back its fierce nature, but to work with this energy.

In the Shining Tribe, just the lion appears standing before a Tree of Life to guide us. Rachel Pollack writes in the companion guide that this lion shows us “the strength that comes from the harmony with life.” This card counsels us to connect “our own actions and feelings to spiritual sources.” 

And perhaps this is what keeps our Six of Tree’s figure appearing so jaunty on the journey. Instead of ignoring the underworld reality or the startle of the trees, they are taking that energy inside of themselves, mixing it within and using it to move forward. The underworld can be scary because it is unfamiliar, but the ancestors are there sending their support to us. There is a lot of energy in the startle—it is as wild as a lion—but that can become fuel for the journey.

When we take this approach to the journey, we can become Speakers of Trees, the wisdom workers of fire’s energy.

In this image, I see the heart of the tree being at the throat so all that is spoken of comes through this muscle. Reading Joy Harjoy’s poem Exile of Memory  in her new anthology Living Nations, Living Words, I heard her as a Speaker of Trees in this stanza from the longer poem:

Here there is a singing tree.

It sings of the history of the trees here.

It sings of Monahwee who stood with his warrior friends On the overlook staring into the new town erected

By illegal residents.

It sings of the Civil War camp, the bloodied The self-righteous, and the forsaken.

It sings of atomic power and the rise

Of banks whose spires mark

The worship places.

The final verse is always the trees.

They will remain.

The last line of the poem is: I will sing it until the day I die.

So even though we live in startling times, I hope you are finding the strength to sing. And in your singing gather out of all the broken and beautiful parts of your life and our world something beautiful because it is truthful. Then the fullness of your song will be a great success and gift to us all.

To help connect with the heart of this moonth, you can use these questions for reflection and/or card play:

SEEING: What is most important to open my eyes to as I travel through this moonth?

STRENGTH: How to connect my actions in response to what I see with spiritual sources?

SINGING: What message can I then bring from my heart to offer to the world?

I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative initiative format for $23.  Sign up with PayPal or email me about sending a check. Because I am away, I will not be doing readings until Saturday, the 14th, around the time of the quarter moon which is a good time to see how the energies of the moonth are developing.

he height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving overnight Friday, July 23rd to Saturday, July 24th  (exact at 10:37pm ET on the 23rd), and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the July 10th new moon are developing. The new moon, guided by its association with The Chariot and Three of Cups, invited us to contemplate what is abundant in our lives and encourages us to share this abundance with others. Out of the full moon revelation about this developing energy, we are issued an invitation to return a gift to the world in the final weeks of the lunar cycle.  

The exact moment of the moon’s fullness comes in the sign of Aquarius associated with the Tarot’s Major Arcana’s Star. The Star is a beautiful support for The Chariot because it shines most brightly in the times of greatest darkness. So when the way forward on the Chariot journey seems most uncertain, The Star’s appearance guides us to keep moving toward the vision, even if we have to move more slowly, more cautiously. 

The Star illuminates both our personal and collective journeys, and in these days collective journeys out of the pandemic, away from lifestyles fueling climate change, or into expanding rather than restricting democracyseem stalled or worse. I’m feeling the weight of the pile up of problems. How ‘bout you?

And yet the stars still shine. They’ll shine tomorrow just as they did a hundred years ago and before there were humans and as the earth was coming into being. Individual stars shift and die, but the constellations are always gathering in the sky to shine a light into the darkness.

Perhaps we need to cultivate the long view of the stars. They don’t exist within a news cycle or term of political office. Their time is expansive, beyond the life of individuals. They invite us to the deeper wells of history past and to present work that may not benefit ourselves but the generations to come. Star time is ancestral time. 

In ancestral time, we can seek to connect with well and loving ancestors who want to aid us in work to heal the Whole. These may not be our most recent ancestors. Perhaps we can reach back to those who lived before the traumas of war, diaspora, enslavement, religious persecution. These ancestors of the far past wait like the stars to aid us if we would but turn our attention to them and open to receive their loving guidance. 

In the Dark Goddess Tarot, the Star is Spider Woman, Hopi Goddess of Thought and Creation.

Deck creator Ellen Lorenzi-Prince recounts some of Spider Woman’s story:

In the darkness in the beginning of Time, Spider Woman is told she is too small and weak to help, yet through intelligence, persistence, and belief, she travels to and returns safely from the Lake of Fire. She succeeds in bringing light and warmth into the world where more imposing animals try and fail. 

Spider Woman is an ancestor to emulate. We may feel small – and we are when seen compared to the whole of the sky! – but we can persist in bringing our unique light into the world and shining it where light is needed. This is our offering. We may never truly know the impact that we have. To know is not what is important. To make the offering is what is essential.

Guided by the ancestors and being a conduit of their radiance from the dark, we can dare to do the difficult with compassion. Because Spider Woman is inspiring our full moon explorations, I am thinking of how across North American we are being called to look at the history of inter-generational trauma inflicted by Indian Boarding Schools and the discovery of unmarked graves of Native children at more than one school. When announcing the US Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in June, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said:

While it may be difficult to learn of the traumas suffered in the boarding school era, understanding its impacts on communities today cannot occur without acknowledging that painful history. Only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future we are all proud to embrace.

This is Star work; work that reaches into the past to bring healing that will ripple back but also forward in time. This looking back keeps me moving toward a vision of renewal and repair that leads to justice. This Star work gives me hope. 

To encourage a revelation on these Star themes as we move through these times of tension, you might do one or combine any of these practices:

• Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the light.
• Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has shifted? (If you haven’t done a reading yet, no problem, just do it now under the light of the full moon. You can try the one included in the new moon post.)
• Bring out your Chariot and Star cards from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below, and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.
• Reflect on questions such as: How can I open to the support of the stars? How can I keep moving toward my vision? What guidance do the ancestors offer to me on the journey? What kind of ancestor do I want to be? What gift do I want to leave for those who come after me? You can, of course, pull cards for any of these questions. You may want to engage in Visio Divina to find the layers of wisdom within the cards.

When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. Note that this is the first of two full moons in Aquarius—the next one is on August 22—so we will really be able to bask in the starlight and contemplate ways to live its beauty and healing out in our lives.

This new moon (arriving on Friday, the 9th, exact at 9:17pm ET) puts us on The Chariot path of movement through the passage of abundance offered to us by the Three of Cups.

It is easy to make the connection to abundance looking at the images offered by artists for the Three of Cups. In the iconic Rider Waite Smith deck, Pamela Coleman Smith shows three women with cups seemingly of celebration lifted as they dance in a field filled with flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

a 1909 card scanned by Holly Voley and retrieved from Sacred Texts.
Deck available from US Games

Tarot author and artisan T.Susan Chang in her wonderful 36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey Through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot muses on this image and makes an interesting connection between abundance and scarcity. Writing about a “scarcity mindset,” Chang recounts her understanding of this term she first encountered in the 1990s:

[It] had to do with thinking life is a zero-sum game, a competition of scarce resources. You can’t afford to be generous when the stakes are your own survival! The attitude needless to say is a recipe for human misery. But what is the antidote. Perhaps it is the “abundance mindset”—the sense that there is more than enough for everyone.

And the Three of Cups—titled the Lord of Abundance by the esotericists—is the perfect illustration of that mindset. 

As I’ve been working with 36 Secrets and pondering the Three of Cups, I have also been reading policy expert Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. With data and compelling stories, the book demonstrates how policies of the long past, very recent past, and still present harm not just people of color but also white people in economic, social/psychological, health, and moral arenas.

An actual event—that is a Three of Cups reversed story—becomes an organizing metaphor for the book: the draining and destruction of the Oak Park Pool in Montgomery, Alabama in 1959. McGhee describes:

The [city] council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well. … Uncomprehending white children cried as city contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, seeded it with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. … The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after they reopened, they never rebuilt the pool.

As evocative as a Tarot image, this story vividly illustrates racism’s blanketing harm. McGhee then offers examples of more complex realities to show how the pool of public resources is constantly being drained to the detriment of all and how racism is at the root of decisions and policies. In the chapter Ignoring the Canary, for example, she walks us through how deregulation and lack of oversight sparked subprime predatory lending to homeowners in communities of color, and—after alerts to the problem with these loans were ignored— led to the 2008 financial crisis that spread the fire of misery to white homeowners as well. Many people of all races lost their homes and have not been able to buy again.

McGhee takes us through cases drawn from public education, housing, health care, voting rights, and environmental policy to show how racism degrades quality of life for all. But McGhee does not just leave us “high and dry” in that drained pool. She invites everyone to be part of creating what she calls the Solidarity Dividend through participating in campaigns like the Fight for $15 (as a minimum wage for all workers), union drives, working for voting rights, or welcoming immigrants to communities needing revitalization.

In a now upright Three of Cups story, McGhee brings us to Lewiston, a struggling former mill town, in Maine, the whitest state in the country. Starting in the 1990s African refugees began finding their way to this quiet small city with low rents and starting their own small businesses to revitalize the downtown. Cecile Thornton, a white Mainer from a Franco-American family who had all moved away, encountered her African neighbors when she sought to break through isolation by reclaiming her ancestral language. When she couldn’t find anyone interested in practicing their French at the Franco Center, she was pointed toward the French Club in Hillview, a subsidized housing complex. She was surprised to find herself the only white person there, but gratefully began a conversation with Edho, a French speaking refugee from the Congo. Over the next year, Cecile studied and improved her French under the tutelage of her African neighbors. They became her community. Today she volunteers to help asylum seekers. Each brings their skills to help the other and the lives of all are improved.

This story makes me think of a particular Three of Cups: the one from the Numinous Tarot where the three celebrants are actually pouring out their cups of different colors into a well or maybe it’s a magical cauldron. As they do, their mixing liquids take on a new hue and are filled with stars. An illuminating flame seems to rise from the shared waters. The sharing of their abundance is creating something even greater. The pool is full to overflowing!

From The Numinous Tarot

The Solidarity Dividend and the Numinous Three of Cups give us visions to move toward, an inspiring destination for our Chariot journey. In the Rider Waite Smith version of the Chariot, the Charioteer is looking toward that destination, but we, the viewers, see only what is being left behind: a walled city. This is a powerful metaphor for what racism has done to us in the United States: divided us from each other, kept us from working together for the common good, trapped us in the institutions and policies made from a scarcity, zero-sum mentality. But the call of the Chariot is clear: leave behind that city and take off toward a more abundant life. 

a 1909 card scanned by Holly Voley and retrieved from Sacred Texts.
Deck available from US Games

McGhee ends her book with:

Since our country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the “We” in “We the People” is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.

To help you explore abundance in your life, you can use these questions for reflection and/or card play:

ABUNDANCE: What is abundant in my life that it would be beneficial to share?

PATH: How to move forward with sharing this abundance?

VISION: What can become real when my abundance is shared?

I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative initiative format for $23.  Sign up with PayPal or email me about sending a check. When I receive notification, I’ll be in touch to let you know about when to expect to receive your reading by email. I generally have openings to do these readings on Mondays and Saturdays.

Want to diver deeper into the inspirations for this moonth’s themes? Visit T. Susan Chang’s website to see all that she has on offer and order 36 Secrets from there. I highly recommend reading all of The Sum of Us. You can get it from the library or your local bookseller. Heather McGhee also has a TED Talk on what racism costs everyone.