The arrival of the new moon stamps the moonth with an initiating energy that shifts and develops through the cycle of growth, fullness, and descent. The reading of the moonth can be done any time between the new and full moons. Revisit the cards you pull periodically up until the next lunation to gain new insight as the light changes. 

Before the moon is made new on July 2nd at 3:16pm ET in the USA, it returns to the place on the astrological Wheel where it began its moonthly journey. The energy gathered through the moonth now flows away into moonless nights. What will you send with this energy to be transformed in the dark?

The moonth we are concluding began and now ends in Gemini which corresponds to the Tarot’s Lovers card. In the Dark Goddess Tarot The Lovers is Freya, the Norse Goddess of Love and Beauty. Ellen Lorenzi-Prince, creator of the Dark Goddess Tarot, description of Her includes:

She is a magician and a shapeshifter, and she teaches the power of charms and spells to the younger gods. She becomes chief of the Valkyries, the divine warrior maidens who choose heroes from among the fallen, and bring them to drink thereafter at the table of the father god Odin or at her own table, which is equal in majesty.

Freya and her Valkyries hold the balance of life and death and their judgements of the dead determine their place in eternity. The Valkyries’ immense power shapes the worlds of the living and the dead.  

And Freya does her work with style. She wears the necklace Brisingamen, the most beautiful piece of jewelry in the world crafted by dwarves in their underground cave. The dwarves know how to bring the depths of the earth into beautiful form and Freya encircles herself with this beauty. 

To convey the essence of Freya, Ellen tells us: Love is power made beautiful. 

Linking love and power is as beautiful as Brisingamen. It dazzles and shows the immensity of love, rescues it from being confined to only the sentimental and individualistic.  This is the kind of warrior love that acts to serve the Whole. This is a love for the challenging times we live in. We want to celebrate any time in the past moonth when we have flowed with such love.

And we want to release where we have fallen short in the call to this kind of love. The writer and Holocoust survivor Elie Wiesel said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” To be indifferent requires no power at all. To be indifferent in times and places where love is absent, under attack, or resisted is to leave love to perish. Even if we are not personally touched by the effects, our soul’s shrink if we do not defend love. Everything becomes ugly. 

The 48 – 24 hours before the July 2 new moon’s arrival at 3:16pm ET is the optimal time for engaging in reflection and ritual to honor the ways our love has been both beautiful and powerful this moonth and to release indifference and its impacts.  

Reflection

At the top of a sheet of paper, you could write a continuum with Power in the center flanked by Love and Indifference. Next to Love write Beauty and Next to Indifference Ugly. Like this

Beauty ← Love ←         Power        → Indifference → Ugly

Now look back on the happenings of the moonth that began on June 3rd. Feel free to use personal, community, national, global happenings. If you journal, you’ll have a handy record for your personal memories, but even just looking back at your appointment calendar can jog your mind about what’s been going on in the past few weeks. Cluster under the headings above phrases that express the happenings of moonth and where they fit. 

If you need help coming up with ideas, you can always turn over Tarot and oracle cards to show you images to inspire ideas.

Be gentle with yourself as you do this. Times are crazy. Indifference is a defense for the overload of the news of the world. But as you reflect, you are invited to think about what you’d like to replace indifference with. Perhaps a feeling flow which allows you to see, acknowledge, feel, and release. 

When your clustering and mapping are complete, let yourself be for a while with the beautiful love you nurtured this moonth. You might reflect on what made this possible – and think about how to keep building that into your life. You might offer gratitude to others, the Divine, and/or yourself for this love and its impacts. You might finish with creating a small art work or saying a closing prayer.

Take your side of indifference and the ugly into the dark moon release ritual.

Dark Moon Release Ritual

Create sacred space by lighting a candle, imagining that you are ringed with a circle of protection, and/or your usual actions.

You can invite Freya and/or the face of Greater Than that you have been serving this moonth to with you and aid you in this dark moon release. Spend as much time as you need connecting with Them.

Then use your imagination to see before you the part of your paper that mapped your indifference. You might imagine it growing larger, being like a wall. But as you contemplate this wall of indifference, you recognize that you can break through it. In your imaginal, meditative state, do this in whatever way comes to you (poking through what is paper thin, taking a hammer to knock out heavy bricks, seeing it explode with fireworks …). When the wall is broken, let yourself feel the flood of love that comes toward you. Imagine it entering your body. 

When you come out of your meditative state you may want to rip up your Indifference side of the paper into very small bits and release them into water. 

After you have completed your releasing, tune into your body, feeling it lighter. Re-center yourself by connecting with earth below you and the sky above you. Feel their energy mix in your heart. Be open to a blessing coming to you from Freya and/or your face of the Greater Than.

When the new moon arrives, you may want to make wishes for your love will be beautiful in the moonth to come. Be sure to write them down to revisit at the end of the moonth. 

The treatment of immigrant children might be the ugliest indifference that surfaced in the moonth past. July 2nd and 12th are both days of action – days of love! – to stop these human rights abuses, call for an end to deportations, and/or close the camps. You can Google and look on Facebook to find actions near your. Announcements on happenings around the country are most welcome in the comments. 

This is the first daily email for our final week of Walking the Ways of the Summer Light focused on Pilgrimage. 

Words to Inspire

Pilgrimage is an imaginary road with real stones in it.

Phil Cousineau,The Art of Pilgrimage 

Wisdom Image

From The Shining Tribe Tarot by Rachel Pollack

Prompts for Practice

Today we begin our Pilgrimage week, which for Walking the Ways, we’ll define as a journey with a focus (the question you crafted yesterday out of all questions you gathered during the the Wisdom Wander weeks) and a destination (that you’ll be contemplating today). The Pilgrimage’s general purpose is to create a container for tending your soul.

Your Pilgrimage week might be very like a Wisdom Wander week with you using the daily e-mail prompts to prepare for a weekend sacred outing. Or you might use this week to plan a longer trip that you take at a later time. You could try out infusing your regular work week with the awareness of Pilgrimage and see if that gives it a different quality. You are invited to shape this Pilgrimage to fit into the contours of your life.

Today you are invited to select a Pilgrimage destination.

With clear intention any place can be a place of pilgrimage, but the pilgrimage tradition invites you to go somewhere that others have also approached with reverence and have sought solace, counsel, and wisdom. I offer these examples to spark your imagination (not to limit your thinking):

A site of longstanding and traditional pilgrimage: Santiago de Campostela in Spain, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the pyramids in Egypt, Newgrange in Ireland, the Serpent Mounds of Ohio. Members of the Tarot Tribe might visit northern Italy, the birth place of the cards. To do some dreaming and research about such places can be an adventure in and of itself. You might also think of places closer to you that are echoes of these sites: a local basilica, retreat center, or site sacred to local native peoples. If selecting a site outside of your tradition, be sure to check if guests are welcomed.

A site where the wild is preserved. In North America, our national and provincial parks contain the natural cathedrals and shrines that have drawn people out of their everyday lives for an experience of wilderness. To hike to the end of the Skyline Trail in Cape Breton, find the Hidden Lake in Glacier National Park, or glimpse the Grand Prismatic in Yellowstone inspire awe and invite devotion. (Yes, there are all trips that I have taken and later realized I’d been on pilgrimage.) A state park, local land trust, or even a large urban park can offer a similar experience.

A site where an ancestor from your profession or vocation lived. Writers and artist take journeys to soak in the landscape and objects of their heroes.  Travel to Emily Dickenson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts or visit the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site during the bicentennial anniversary of his birth in 2018, for example.

A place significant to your family or their country of origin.  Descendants of 19th century immigrants to the United States can visit Ellis Island to see where their ancestors first arrived in the United States, for example. A journey of discovery back to your ancestors country of origin leads you even further back into your ancestral roots.

Looking for support in making your selection? Always feel free to pull a Tarot or Oracle card and see if the image inspires a location.

This is the first daily email for our fire-focused week of Walking the Ways of the Summer Light. Emails the rest of the week support connecting with wisdom guides, contemplating fire as an element and from the Tarot tradition, and going out for a wisdom wander. Also today, the 14th is the full moon and Friday, the 21st, brings the Summer Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. These days are super-charged for an illumination about love. I have been inspired by the Solstices as points in the year when Light and Dark joyfully reunite like lovers who’ve been separated. They each traveled alone for a while to tend their own nature, but the Solstice is their re-connection point.

Words to Inspire

Isn’t it time to turn your heart into a temple of fire?

Rumi

Wisdom Image

Central image from the Shining Tribe, which connects Tress to suit of Fire

Prompts for Practice 

• gazing at the image above or your favorite Tarot card from the suit connected to fire (most commonly the suit with titles like Wands, Staves, or Trees);
• basking in the light of the sun or moon; or
• imagining the energy that flows through a field of flowers, a stand of trees, or the multitude of cells that burn within you.

• What do you already know about the fire element (from the Tarot’s fire suit, or connecting physically with fire and energy, or from your spiritual tradition’s teachings about fire?
• How have you encountered fire in your life?
• What lessons might fire offer you?
• What might you receive from some time spent connecting with fire and energy?
• What gifts can you offer to fire?