The Balsamic Moon Blog #7 and #8
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia. Photo by Rhett A, Butler.
Metabolizing Despair
I began this blog last fall as a way of sharing my own personal rituals about facing fear, loss, and change. As an astrologer, I knew 2020 would be a year of dramatic change, in which we’d all be dealing with Plutonian themes (death, transformation, despair). I didn’t anticipate a global pandemic.
I published my last blog post while I was on a trip to New York and Philly in early March, but I’d written it a few days before—weeks before lockdown, weeks before we knew there was a deadly virus moving through the country. On the first day of our trip, concern about the coronavirus seemed overly paranoid. But each day the background levels of collective dread rose a little, and by the end of our trip every day brought exponentially worse news. Five days before we flew home and entered voluntary quarantine (a week ahead of the national shutdown), we were at the Natural History Museum with our sisters, touching dinosaur fossils and herding small children. I remember doing a dance with my sister, pressing our foreheads together and swaying slightly, like we’ve done since we were teenagers. My partner’s nieces were curious and tried it, too. We giggled the way people do when they’re acting oddly in a crowded place, full of families and tourists and people checking bags and buying tickets and eating lunch on the broad front steps. I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, and the joyous, chaotic throng of life there is familiar to me. A few months later, this memory of a sunny day in New York when my partner and I got to introduce our families to each other feels like a vanished world.
Until the pandemic, I was doing these grief rituals monthly. I carved out a time during the balsamic moon phase, I called in protection and beauty and boundaries as I faced the shadows. Now—as we all face unprecedented, prolonged grief and fear—I’m praying all the damn time. Like many things during a global pandemic, the format that worked before isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Moving forward, a lot of things won’t cut it anymore. We have serious work ahead of to liberate this world from the death cult known as business-as-usual. We need to push for a world where governments don’t relax pollution restrictions while people in the most polluted regions are dying faster from this virus. A world where we love and protect the most vulnerable instead of keeping them locked in cages, refusing them adequate care, and deciding it’s okay to prioritize the economy over their lives. We are not all affected by this virus equally. The people who are most vulnerable to this virus are already the most vulnerable under business-as-usual. This is why the US government is so cavalier about reopening our country while infection rates are still rising in many places. They consider the death of these people acceptable. Mere numbers numb the heart. Notice the absence of context in the phrase “3,000 deaths per day.” It’s not “3,000 people each day die painfully and alone, leaving behind children and spouses and collaborators whose lives will never feel complete without them, and traumatizing the care workers who are risking their own lives to save so many.” When we stay in numbers, we can stay numb. We can go back to normal.
Before the pandemic, in a state of slow and quite despair that might have just felt “normal,” many of us gave up on fighting the genocidal, geocidal business-as-usual way of life. Maybe in peak moments we felt outrage, then time grinds on and we return to powerless, numb. We are in a peak moment now, and they’re trying to lull us back into numbness.
And sometimes numbness is easier, because it hurts to love what’s dying—like the Amazon rainforest and those whose lives are woven through it, the indigenous protectors who are falling ill and can no longer halt the increase of logging. Humans are destroying this forest, the lungs of our planet, as a virus is destroying so many human lungs. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, lungs are associated with grief. Many of us in the US don’t have cultural grief practices, don’t know how to handle the pain of grief. We’re used to winning. Americans love a happy ending, a quick fix. We want to sign a petition or raise awareness. We like to be busy doing instead of stuck at home, feeling powerless in our grief.
But this crisis doesn’t have a tidy, clean ending. Coronavirus is one among many indicators that we are environmentally out of balance. There will be more novel viruses as more animals are displaced from their habitats. As climate changes rapidly and we are in Earth’s sixth mass extinction, there really is no normal to go back to. What has seemed normal for centuries has been killing us (though unequally, some more than others) and the many species we share our world with. If we don’t have tools to work with the truly gigantic grief and fear this raises, it’s impossible not to shut down, go numb, and retreat to despair. We sink into despair, we feel powerless to climb out of it. Maybe this is where you are, right now. Sunk into it.
Which brings me to the secret behind all these grief rituals: when we do have effective tools for experiencing grief, terror, and pain we can stave off despair. We can stay in touch with what is good and beautiful and joyous, without needing a guarantee of a happy ending. We can keep showing up for the hard work of being human. In the immortal words of James Baldwin, “I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.” Or, to paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon: the work of transforming the world is not ours to finish but neither can we turn away from it.
So, as someone who’s not currently in despair but has been familiar with it, I offer you a tool. I consider this a spiritual tool, but you might not. I’m sharing it the way it works for me, but you may need to customize it for yourself. As always, the more you practice the easier it gets.
Metabolizing Despair. An Exercise.
Despair tells us it is the only reality. In despair, our bodies lock up and refuse to be in connection with anything outside the despair story. Despair can be self-protective, though it might feel more like a nightmare.This pandemic itself feels like a nightmare, including the dream logic of life feeling strangely ordinary (for many) while something terrible has happened or is still happening or will happen. We can wake up from a nightmare, though. This is not to say the pandemic isn’t real, but rather that we are trapped in something that is only one version of reality.
So, begin by acknowledging there is more to the story than you can currently perceive. Reality is more complex than you can perceive. This may not be comforting yet, but it’s a necessary first step. Don’t jump from this to trying to cheer yourself up with visions of possibly rosy outcomes. Optimistic fantasies aren’t the antidote to nihilistic fantasies. What you’re looking for is a different orientation to time itself.
You may be stuck in a story that tells you: “What I love is dying (or has died or will die).” Maybe it’s a loved one, or an ecosystem, or your own body. Despair freezes the grief process, ricochets the pain forward and backward into infinity. What I love has always died, what I love will always die. I am caught in the tenuous center in which I love—on all sides are death (if death isn’t your fixation, repeat this exercise with oppression or cruelty as the focus). Whatever you feel hemmed in by, I want you to focus on that sliver of present tense: “I love.” The center of the phrase. “I love.” This is what your despair is trying to protect you from: the pain of loving. Loving and grieving are two aspects of the same experience. You can flip them like you flip a coin—joy and pain, pain and joy. To be able to love is what you are here for. That love might look like playing music or studying physics or raising a family or having orgies. Love is a quality of attention and engagement that ripples out in all times and dimensions and creates the conditions for healing to happen.
This is when you may need to cry. If you are able to cry, you are well on your way to getting unstuck. You might need to ugly cry for a long time. You might need to cry every day for months or years. Crying may become a practice, an exercise, like anything else you do to maintain your human life. If you are unable to cry, you will need to be gentler and slower as you ease out of despair and back into connection with what is alive in you. Remember, there is so much you can’t control—in despair, you have created a world of total tragedy because it is one in which you know what to expect. Staying in reality means staying open to uncertainty—arguably much scarier than tragedy. When you practice these exercises, you’re extending your ability to stay with what is real, even as it remains unknown and uncertain. In staying with uncertainty, you are bringing your attention and presence to what it means to be alive in a way that can only be called love. And when you practice love in this way, you feel it holding you up. This ceases to be a solo exercise. Loving and being loved cease to be separate actions. This is where it gets a little mystical, so if you’re not into the woo feel free to rewrite this part. But don’t omit it! Think about the reciprocity that exists in all encounters—Earth’s gravity pulling on me as my body pulls on it. Get as scientific as you want to, while understanding that love is the act of deeply searching to know—deeply enough to understand what all that you can never fully know.
Support this blog: I have a Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog, and subscribe for all kinds of astrological insights and expanded horoscopes.
(tentative) Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
May 20: Ritual #9
June 5: Blog Post #9
June 19: Ritual #10
July 5: Blog Post #10
August 17: Ritual #11
September 2: Blog Post #11
Balsamic Moon Blog #6
Meredith Monk in Book of Days, courtesy of the Jewish Film Institute.
Welcome back to my monthly meditation on change, loss, and transformation. This month brings us into meditations on peak experiences when death feels near, and how collective rituals can bring us back into awe for shared aliveness.
For several years of my life, the nearness of death was like the nearness of my own breath. Like the knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, awareness of death was a frequent visitor. I was in my early thirties and functionally disabled by mysterious, recurrent illnesses. I had no diagnosis, no clear understanding of why my body caught every infection as a paralyzing blow. Days spun out, my consciousness hovering between wakefulness and trance. Over time, I lived in a corner of my mind that was tethered to but not entirely immersed in my body, which I experienced as a baffling and antagonizing companion.
When I developed a kidney infection that progressed alarmingly fast the doctors prescribed a powerful broad-spectrum antibiotic that I was terrified to take, and terrified not to take. After a few days, an allergic reaction to the drug rushed me to the hospital. If the infection hadn’t cleared, I’d be in trouble—hospitalization and a trial of less effective drugs would be the next step.
I waited for the test results on the raised ER bed, listening to machines beeping and nurses’ footsteps in the hallway. The infection itself had drained me. The drug seemed to have beaten me up from the inside, leaving every inner organ bruised. Too weak to lift my head, I let my eyes focus on what was closest—my outstretched arm. I felt the nearness of death. And, for what felt like the first time, I was moved by how beautiful my skin was—every pore on my arm lifting every delicate hair, every freckle, every ridge and bump. Beauty was no longer a comparative process (is this part of my body pretty or ugly?) but was inherent in sheer existence. My arm, my hand, these were mine. Being alive, having a body—why had I never understood what immeasurable beauty these things held? I made an unkeepable vow—if I could only recover and go home, I’d never be critical or apathetic about my body again.
And I did get to go home. The infection had cleared and I needed a few weeks of bed rest. And it would take a few more years to find the doctors and the diagnosis and the treatment that brought me back to functional health. Now it seems ordinary to wake up pain-free most days and able to ride a bicycle and lift weights. But ordinary is the opposite of transcendent. When I was at my sickest, transcendent gratitude was with me as much as fear was. I felt then that if I could only have a life where I’d be well enough to ride my bicycle a few times a year—that, even that, would be enough for eternal gratitude, eternal joy. I have that now, but such gratitude is nearly impossible to maintain. I can’t access the deep epiphanies I had when it felt like my life was a gift I may not get to keep for long. And though I’m mending my relationship with my body, I don’t marvel at its beauty nearly as much as I wish I could. Because that awe requires a shift from the ordinary to the transcendent—where we can be amazed by the small moments, the imperfections, the exactly-as-it-is-right-now-ness of merely being.
Catastrophes can catapult us out of the ordinary, as can profound joy. Both are shocking states—to be in love, to be in religious ecstasy, to be on the other side of a brush with death—these draw huge spikes across the electrical currents of our being. Intensity is the express route away from ordinary perspective, but there is also a slower pace with less adrenalin-charged highs and lows.
So far in this post, we’ve been dwelling in the Scorpionic depths—as this blog is intended to do, as we do whenever go into deep pain and trauma and nearness to death. But my Balsamic Moon Ritual this month took place under the sign of Pisces, and as I share this with you we’re experiencing the Virgo Full Moon that rounds out Pisces energy. This polarity of Pisces and Virgo is the polarity between finding perfection and finding imperfections, being outside of time and being in the here and now, flowing into bliss and clarifying analysis. When we integrate these opposites, we find ourselves experiencing extraordinary states of communion within the ordinariness of our living bodies, here and now. The transcendent and mundane, together.
The ritual I experienced this month wasn’t one that I planned, and I didn’t experience it alone. Rather, a small group of friends gathered for shabbat, knowing we wanted to sing together. Usually we sing in Hebrew or Yiddish, tasting the words of our ancestors on our tongues, but this week we began by singing a wordless song by Meredith Monk. We had been speaking of memories, and one friend suggested we try to sing our memories to this tune, improvising in turns and seeing what happened. Another friend made an important amendment: that these memories not be our biggest ones, not the major stories we tell about our lives. We allowed memories to arise, one's we perhaps hadn't remembered until that moment, the ritual became a way of accessing these simple moments that held something about our being, but were not well-worn stories in our memories. This moved us from memories that might be highly charged—the express route—to smaller, quieter impressions that floated to the surface and were charged with a sense of wonder.
So we started to sing together, one person at a time finding words for a small moment from their past as the others hummed or chanted the melody with them. For hours we wove this spell, memories feeding other memories, until we began to feel part of a larger consciousness, not just our own. As our bodies entrained together through song, we wove these small moments into our own memories: The sound of wind blowing through holes left by reeds in a frozen pond. Going to the corner store with a friend you secretly liked. Making leaf bouquets for your mom that she kept in coolers on the porch. Wisconsin, 1992. Playing with rubber cement at your uncle’s graphic design studio. Ephemera of memory: precise, small, beautiful.
As we sung together, our memories became a story of our collective memory. This is what is has been like, being alive together in these times. These are the stray fragments that rise to the surface that are ordinary, that are beautiful, that were lost until just now and may be lost again.
Support this blog: I have a Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog, and subscribe for all kinds of astrological insights and expanded horoscopes.
(the title for this blog post comes from this excellent book)
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
March 22: Ritual #7
April 8: Blog Post #7
April 22: Ritual #8
May 7: Blog Post # 8
May 20: Ritual #9
June 5: Blog Post #9
June 19: Ritual #10
July 5: Blog Post #10
August 17: Ritual #11
September 2: Blog Post #11
September 2: Blog Post
The Balsamic Moon Blog #4 and #5
Welcome back to the Balsamic Moon Blog! This is where I report back to you on the rituals I’m working this year to face grief, loss, and transformation. I took a break from posting last month because what came up in ritual wasn't ready to be shared yet. This month’s ritual deepened into the same themes. This is the risk I take in having a public-facing project that delves into the mysteries of transformation! But here are some thoughts from the last two months, and I thank you as always for accompanying me in this process.
Balsamic Moon Ritual #4 and #5 - A Spell for Letting Go
Letting go is harder than it seems.
I talk a good game about letting go. Every week, I support clients in releasing stuck patterns and getting curious about change. My sister and I even made a painting called “A Spell for Letting Go.” I spent a full year embroidering a screen-printed patch of that image. It was the first year Trump was in power, and the last year I was in a particularly difficult partnership. Looking back now, I find it interesting that I chose sewing as a way to work a spell about release—with each stitch, I was fixing the energy of that moment into the cloth. I was preserving, mending, cocooning in silk all the vast and tiny fears, stress, and uncertainties about the future.
Sometimes you know something before you let yourself know it. I could feel my future careening away from what I thought it would be, both with my partner and in the larger world. I told everyone embroidering this spell was a way of embracing these changes, but if you’re gonna to do a releasing spell, there are far better methods I can think of. I could have burnt something, thrown something in the river, buried something, ran or sang until my lungs ran out of breath—but no, nope, I made an intensely detailed, tactile object that is really a map of how much I try to keep things together. I tried so hard to keep that world intact. And I poured the stress of that activity into this piece of fabric.
The fun thing about embroidering is you get to stab something over and over again. Perhaps you’re in a tense meeting where people have different ideas about how to plan a rally or handle an accountability process. Perhaps you’ve reached a place in your relationship where you can’t communicate clearly anymore and the silences are full of misunderstandings. The needle goes in, sharp little jabs, again and again. It leaves a beautiful trail of silk in its wake. This is what I’m good at—taking the pain in the room and transforming it into something beautiful. Actually letting go of the pain or the fear or the attachment, not so much.
What’s the big deal about letting go, anyway? My Taurus Moon really wants to know. I get strongly attached, even if a home or a lover or an identity is no longer good for me. Is attachment like this a fear of death? Because we experience so many deaths in our lifetimes—when an important relationship ends, who you were with that person goes through a kind of death. If you are able-bodied and become disabled, if you transition away from your assigned gender, if you break ties with a family member, if you leave your home country and settle far away—even if you just keep living and don’t make any conscious changes, you’ll still find parts of you have died while you weren’t paying attention. And the thing is, as sad as this may make us, it’s pretty beautiful. I don’t know about you, but I see death as part of a larger cycle that always includes a kind of rebirth. All these small deaths teach us how to transform. They let us become instead of merely being. If we can’t let go, we can’t become.
Energetically, what we can’t let go of ends up somewhere in our bodies—a pattern of lower back pain or migraines, a disruption in the endocrine system, a hyper-vigilant nervous system. I’m fascinated by how our bodies hold our stories, almost like they are dream images we need to decode to understand what’s happening in our minds. Too often, we focus on frustration and fear, we interpret our bodies’ symptoms as antagonism instead of love. We feel betrayed. We resent the pain, the incapacity, the godawful uncertainty of when or if this symptom will end. Our resentment tightens us. Fear of future pain, fear of illness, fear of any kind constricts us. To learn to let go, we need to first let go of our fear.
So this is my ritual for you, if you choose to share it with me. You can read it as a bedtime story, chant it as a lullaby, rewrite it and share it however you wish. It goes like this:
Your body loves you, an animal love.
Growling, howling, nestling, settling.
Here is the place where you stay warm.
Set a watcher so you will know
when to spring up, and when you can let go.
And when it’s time for letting go,
May each death bring you deeper
under water, into amazement, back to love.
Support this blog: I have a new Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog, and subscribe for all kinds of astrological insights and expanded horoscopes.
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
February 21: Ritual #6
March 9: Blog Post #6
March 22: Ritual #7
April 8: Blog Post #7
April 22: Ritual #8
May 7: Blog Post # 8
May 20: Ritual #9
June 5: Blog Post #9
June 19: Ritual #10
July 5: Blog Post #10
August 17: Ritual #11
September 2: Blog Post #11
The Balsamic Moon Blog #3
Tehching Hsieh, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984, New York. © 1984 Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano. Courtesy of the artists and Sean Kelly, New York.
Choosing Faith
“Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one …. ” Anne Boyer, What Resembles The Grave But Isn’t
Imagine this sentence is a rope, cast from the bottom of a dark hole up into the light. Let’s call this rope faith. Maybe there is someone up there to catch the rope, someone with strong arms and a firm foothold, someone who can hoist us up and out. Maybe not. Maybe the rope will fall back, collapsing in graceful arabesques. When faith collapses into fear, it’s not always obvious. We may feel acute panic, but most of the time we find ways of pretending‚ even to ourselves, that everything is fine. We distract ourselves, we criticize something, we try to feel a sense of control, we dig ourselves a more comfortable hole-within-a-hole and lie very still until it feels safe to emerge—however long that might take. Anne Boyer writes of “sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another.”
Faith is the act of throwing the rope up again and again and again. Faith is the hallmark of Sagittarius energy—that special buoyancy that allows us to keep rising above our present troubles and believing the future will be better. Faith can be foolish, or even dangerous, as when we keep believing an abusive relationship will get better if we just try harder, or when we have faith in governments to give us justice, or corporations to clean up the environment they polluted. But faith is also powerful medicine against despair—against staying in that hole forever and pretending this is good enough.
Today, on the Gemini Full Moon of 2019, as massive wildfires engulf Australia and protests disrupt climate talks in Madrid, as my country continues to imprison children and families using a rhetoric of fear that is strikingly similar to the rhetoric that justified the Holocaust, as we find ourselves in a period of mass extinction that forces us to ask how much longer the Earth will support life as we know it, as I recover from inhaling ambient toxins in my office after it caught fire two days ago, as I drink homemade ginger-turmeric tea and wonder if I can afford the longterm medicine I need, I can feel into the waves of fear and grief washing over our planet. I can also feel the warm bite of ginger on my sore throat and I think of my cousin who taught me this recipe, how to blend fresh ginger and turmeric root together with honey, how to sprinkle black pepper on top to help activate the curcumin. I can feel my body’s understanding of how to heal, given the proper resources it needs. And I know there will be illnesses I never heal from, given the sheer fact of aging and mortality. On a larger scale, my energetic connection to this world is responding to an onslaught of stress—what we might call systemic oppression, environmental devastation, global neoliberalism as an inexorable force of banal evil. And I still believe in the possibility of healing.
When I was in my twenties, the anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia was full of books with titles like “Another World is Possible.” Coming off the enthusiastic, colorful, puppet-filled protests of the anti-globalization movement in the 90s, the early 2000s were still by and large a time of faith. I believed we were winning, as our banners proclaimed, so much that I never learned to drive a car. Surely our reliance on fossil fuel and highways would be over any day now. I believed in the capacity of my activist community to care for each other well enough that I spent most of my time invested in these relationships and as little time as possible earning money. I placed my life in the hands of my friends, again and again, and we kept each other safe. Those years felt like a kind of magic spell, like opening a door into a fairy world where ordinary reality holds no sway. All the rules I’d been taught about how to survive were upended—it was like each of us had jumped out of a window and no one could fly on their own, but together we managed to hold each other up.
And then I got sick, and the laws of the marketplace once more imposed themselves on the rhythms of my life. I had to go back to work to afford doctors and medicine, and as I had little energy left for friends and activism, I was increasingly isolated. I spent some time crushed by the failure of my community to meet my needs—we had amateur herbalists, but no one who could get me the lab tests I need and an accurate diagnosis. We had free bagels and pizza scavenged from dumpsters, but I had to spend money on fresh, healthy foods to stay well. A bubble burst for me, and it took some time to forgive “the community”—which was who, really?—for the ways I had to leave it to seek healing. I’ve heard a similar story from so many people who age out of activism, who find that once they have emotional or physical needs that require a slower pace, they feel left behind.
In my first years of illness, I spent a long time grappling with fear and faith. I still believed in relationships as where we create revolutionary forms of healing, strength, and shared power. The more I pulled back and saw the larger perspective (a Sagittarius skill), the more I saw lines of connection between everyone I knew, the more I could forgive individual acts of carelessness or fear. Tilting my head to one side, I saw our communities as traumatized, self-righteous, and haphazard. Tilting my head to another angle, I saw us as experimenting with unprecedented ways of healing what we inherited from our parents and their parents and all the ancestors that enslaved and dominated and poisoned, and all the ancestors that suffered and resisted and became embittered and some who became free. I saw the whole damn map of us, going back generations, and I was able to love our efforts to heal what’s been broken for a long time, even if it’s still mostly broken.
What I came to was something I later found in the work of Joanna Macy—that we cannot know that we will win, but that we must believe it’s possible—this belief give us the energy to keep trying. In our current moment of uncertainty, in the long years ahead of us as we see clear evidence that things are getting worse, we need faith. Not blind faith that someone else will solve the problem and release us from responsibility, but faith that is an act of creation. It’s the act of throwing up that rope, again and again, even if we doubt anyone is up there to grab it. It’s the joy we feel in the act of throwing, and even the pleasure of hearing the rope swoosh back down into our empty hands. This kind of faith relies on feeling connected to something much larger than ourselves—whether that’s a divine energy or merely the existence of so many other humans throwing up ropes from their own holes, hoping maybe one rope will find another and we can pull ourselves out together.
Balsamic Moon Ritual #3 Summary:
Intention: To interrogate the nature of faith
Main activity: For this ritual, I lit a candle and invited my ancestors to join me as I went into a trance and did some free-writing, mostly asking questions that were impossible for me to answer and then noticing what answers came through.
What I learned: Faith is powerful medicine when it is an intentional act, less so when it encourages passivity.
Join the conversation: What is your relationship to faith and doubt?
Support this blog: I’ve just soft-launched a Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog. In the new year, there will be all kinds of goodies there for subscribers—for now, it’s merely a place to offer support if you feel so moved!
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
December 23: Ritual
January 10: Blog Post
January 22: Ritual
February 9: Blog Post
February 21: Ritual
March 9: Blog Post
March 22: Ritual
April 8: Blog Post
April 22: Ritual
May 7: Blog Post
May 20: Ritual
June 5: Blog Post
June 19: Ritual
July 5: Blog Post
August 17: Ritual
September 2: Blog Post
The Balsamic Moon Blog #2
Loving What Changes
"I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included." -- Rainer Maria Rilke
Gustav Klimt
I've lived with anxiety my whole life. When I was younger, too young for language, I dreamed of black birds coming up over the horizon and filling the sky. Their endless wheeling dizzied me, and I was horrified at my helplessness to control my own mind and make the images stop, even after I woke up. As a teenager I began experiencing panic attacks, which I can describe now as cascading, escalating loops of alarm in response to change. A change in mood, a change in my body, a change in the weather, a change in my company. Living with panic is mounting resistance to change in all forms. It is the body's desire for homeostasis writ in fireworks. I've spent decades of my life learning how to listen to my body's subtler cues so it won't need to fire up all its cannons to shock me into rest and recovery mode.
In the first part of this series, I introduced this blog as a monthly meditation on change, loss, and fear. This month, working with the balsamic moon right before the Scorpio new moon, my focus is on change and stasis—the axis of Scorpio and Taurus. I invite you to join me in this rituals every month (there's a schedule at the bottom of the post), in your own way, where and when you can. I also welcome your comments—companionship is one of the best tools we have to face our fears.
Second Balsamic Moon Ritual
On October 27th, on a bright fall day, I took a walk in the woods.
I was surprised to feel called out into the world, and specifically toward noticing the beauty of the forest as it sloughed off its dead and dying parts. My first ritual sent me inward, into my fears about the world, about my health, about what it means to be mortal. I expected the second to look a lot like the first. But then I realized the coming full moon inflects these rituals with its energy—for the Aries full moon, I needed to develop courage to begin this process, and I needed an intense focus on the self. As each sign balances and corrects the excesses of the previous sign, Taurus offers a space of rest after the intense energy expenditure of Aries. Where Aries inspires us to face fears and act, Taurus reminds us that beauty is restorative. Taurus invites us to rest in our connection to the earth, to rub our limbs in the dirt and cover ourselves with flowers.
Full moons always mirror what sign the sun is in—the Taurus new moon opposes the sun in Scorpio. Where I live, in the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, Scorpio season is a time of trees dropping their leaves. Bright yellow Big Leaf Maple leaves, larger than my head, smaller leaves streaked with red and green, dry brown fir needles—all these pieces that were once part of a living organism, that absorbed sunlight and converted into sugary sweetness, that fed and nourished—all these pieces die in bursts of beauty. Taurus beauty nourishes and balances the death processes of Scorpio. The two are never separate.
As ritual this month, I walked slowly through the forest, stooping to admire small scenes of death and transformation. Some fallen leaves were still wet and waxen, others curled and skittered in the wind, scraping the ground like waves of a dry ocean. I also noticed the stumps of trees, nurse logs losing their crisp edges and blurring under a skin of moss and ferns. I saw white mushrooms luminous over dark, wet wood. Again and again, as I focused on the death process, I saw new life. And each transformation was its very own—this leaf crumbling, this rotting, one bright, one faded. Transformation by water, rot. By air, crumbling. By earth, mushrooming. By fire, rising. Energy moves through matter, astonishing us with what it can become.
Coming back from this ritual, I felt I'd watched a play. Each leaf, each mushroom, each scattering of needles and decomposing plant matter was a scene I'd studied long and carefully. Paying attention is a magical act, and one I use most often as an artist, or when I need to calm fear. Looking closely at one moment of transformation fixes that moment, and reminds us of the larger story. Trees will drop leaves again and again, but each leaf will be its own unique event. I am in love with this particularity—one leaf dissolved into a skeletal net, another splayed wetly against a tree stump like someone on a life raft.
Working this ritual reminded me of the deeper layers of Taurus energy. In the midst of change, we find safe haven in beauty. Humans are good at negativity bias—at anticipating and expecting worst-case scenarios. Taurus is the energy that flips our nervous systems from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. In Taurus, we find the stories that balance fear of change and death—reminders of what nourishes us deeply, and how death itself is nourishing to life. A dying tree can not only become a nurse log for other trees, it can send its nutrients out to the trees around it as it dies, releasing what it has hoarded to feed its children and cousins. Working with Taurus, we say yes to nourishment in all its forms.
Balsamic Moon Ritual #2 Summary:
Intention: To notice and appreciate the beauty of the death process
Main activity: Walking through the forest, looking closely at what is dying and what is growing from that death.
What I learned: Death offers nourishment; beauty offers a safe haven for our nervous systems. Loving anything means loving its changes. Paying attention is a form of loving that calms fear.
Join the conversation: Where do you find beauty in transformation? What helps you feel nourished?
Support this blog: I've just soft-launched a Patreon page for those who'd like to donate to this blog. In time it will have more offerings, but for now you can see photos from my second ritual. Thanks if you feel so moved!
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
November 25: Ritual
December 11: Blog Post
December 23: Ritual
January 10: Blog Post
January 22: Ritual
February 9: Blog Post
February 21: Ritual
March 9: Blog Post
March 22: Ritual
April 8: Blog Post
April 22: Ritual
May 7: Blog Post
May 20: Ritual
June 5: Blog Post
June 19: Ritual
July 5: Blog Post
August 17: Ritual
September 2: Blog Post
The Balsamic Moon Blog
From Poison to Medicine
It’s the Aries full moon today, a good time to begin something new—even if this new blog is all about endings. For the next twelve months, I’ll be posting on the full moon about fear, endings, and transformation, drawing from rituals I’ll be doing each balsamic moon (right before the new moon—a time of endings). You can join me in this exploration of our personal and collective shadows, or merely support me by reading. Below, the first post.
Vasilisa, by Ivan Bilibin
In September I had a birthday and I drew up my solar return chart to get a sense of the year ahead—not what will happen in the world, but what’s coming up within me. Solar returns are an energetic snapshot of our shifting energy, of what we pay attention from birthday to birthday. Usually, I see a wide range of themes—maybe a strongly placed Venus brings relationships into focus, or maybe sixth house planets encourage me to take my health more seriously. Analyzing all these pieces of data and weaving them into a map for the year ahead is a generally a fun birthday present for myself. Picture me humming that satisfied tune all Virgos hum when they have a complicated puzzle to solve and the right tools to solve it. Even as I don’t try to predict the future, solar returns give me a sense of control over myself—a way to shape my own future through problem-solving and focused projects.
Not this year.
This year I found one message in all caps. With several exclamation marks. Perhaps even a skull emoji. And it said something like this:
This year, you need to release control. This year, you will face your fears. Something is transforming in you. Most likely, you will lose something you don’t want to lose. If you align with transformation, you’ll find healing, wisdom, and resilience. Even so, you will often feel lost and uncertain. You will be very different on the other side. Don’t try this alone.
If you’re curious, this message came to me though excessive emphasis on Pluto, Scorpio, and the 8th house. Every major player in the chart was linked to these themes of death and regeneration, trauma and healing, intensity and transformation. If I see three links to a theme, I take notice. Here, I saw over a dozen.
So what do you do with a message like this? In many ways, the history of astrology is the story of trying to avert disaster, of uncovering the hidden cycles of the cosmos that will help us thrive rather than suffer. While this is a very human impulse, the shadow side of astrology is the need to control. I never forget that I work in a discipline that has been bent to help kings and dictators keep power. Western astrology also comes to us through cultures of patriarchy, colonialism, and conquer. The same oppressions that we face in our culture are tightly woven into the tools I use to resist that oppression. But there are ways of subverting this. When I learned astrology as a healing tool, I was taught to focus on the highest in the chart. The same themes that look like poison have the potential to be medicine.
This is my task, this year. Transform poison into medicine. This is the only map I have for my year ahead.
As I lived into the first month since my birthday, I found my deepest fears everywhere I looked. Personally, these include the sharp return of a chronic health condition that has been dormant for years, as well as financial scarcity and relationship uncertainty. Collectively, I’m seeing my communities shaken by important call-outs and insufficient understanding of what transformative healing looks like after them. Globally, there are almost too many to mention, from climate change to the rise of concentration camps in the US. In the course of this blog, I’ll be touching into all these things, moving from the personal to the collective to the global and back again, looking for connections. Because what we’re facing collectively isn’t separate from our own illnesses and financial worries. It is deeply enmeshed in our relationships.
Next year is shaping up to be a critical time for all of us, a time when the current crises may become exponentially worse—or when we start to find other ways of living. I don’t have a program for a better way forward—how to shape a future that is more empathic, more creative, more healed, more queer, more just—but I do know for us to be able to imagine and weave such a world, we need to be able to face our fears.
For the next twelve months, I’m taking on this task with a monthly ritual. Every balsamic moon, I’ll be doing a ritual about facing fear, loss, and endings. For me, this is personal work, political work, and spiritual work. My intention isn’t to wallow in negativity, but to make room for real transformation. I invite you to join me in this if you feel called to this kind of work—I’ll be posting my calendar below, or you can set your own days for doing ritual. I’ll be posting my intentions on Instagram the day before I do each ritual. If you don’t feel drawn to that level of engagement, you can also support me by being in conversation with me—commenting, asking questions, even just reading along each month. Being in connection with you will help me do this!
So, to end this first post, here’s what happened in my first Balsamic Moon ritual:
On September 27th, the day before the new moon, I made an altar in my backyard under the towering Sitka Spruce that spreads long, drooping arms across our yard. The afternoon was sunny and dry, warm enough to sit outside for half an hour and listen to the wind. I had written down my intentions for the ritual—to encounter death and its transformational energy, and the songs I would sing—several Hebrew prayers I’ve learned as I’ve been reconnecting to my Jewish ancestors. I sang in protection, I sang in love, and I invited my beloved dead to be with me in this space. I invited my own death to be a guest in this circle, acknowledging how present death is throughout our lives, how it is knit into our very cells. I felt into the pain in my body, the organs that have been struggling lately, the exhaustion in my muscles. When I was in this space of protection and connection, I sobbed out loud for how much I love this life. Every dead leaf, every crumbling seedpod, every hair on my living arm. The grief of loving is such a powerful force, and I let the sobbing carry me past any story about why I sobbed. At a certain point, my biggest fear seemed to be death itself—losing my capacity to sense and taste life, to inhabit my own mind and memories, to hug dogs and kiss my friends. At another point, my biggest fear seemed to be being alive as a human—being subject to internal chaos, feeling adrift in the universe, having a narrow perspective on time and interconnection. As I cried, the day turned rainy and the wind picked up. The spruce branch stroking my back felt comforting. I sang once more, thanking and saying goodbye to the beings I’d invited in. I ended the ritual by coming back to life—I took a walk, ate some fruit, and prepared for dinner with my friends.
After this ritual a certain feeling lingered with me—not that life was less scary, but that I was more full of life. On so many days, I abandon myself. I’m busy, I’m in pain, I’m tired—I shut down. I might not even realize it’s happening. After this ritual, I felt I was fully present, all pieces of me accounted for and alert. That feeling of wholeness within oneself is a kind of joy, a kind of power. This power is the opposite of controlling power. From a sense of wholeness, we can improvise. We can dance with the uncertainty and strangeness of life, we can accept grief and fear as several steps in the larger dance.
Balsamic Moon Ritual Summary:
Intention: To face my fear of death, and my fear of public self-disclosure (hello, I’m Corina Dross and I’ve published articles for many years but never so clearly centering myself).
Main activity: Sobbing under a tree, telling you about it.
What I learned: We need to grieve in order to reconnect with our deep love for life. We need to feel held when we grieve—by ancestors, by trees, by our beloved dead, by living friends—whatever is available.
Join the conversation: What are your rituals for facing fear? What holds you? What brings you back to courage, or joy?
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
September 27: Ritual
October 13: Blog Post
October 25: Ritual
November 12: Blog Post
November 25: Ritual
December 11: Blog Post
December 23: Ritual
January 10: Blog Post
January 22: Ritual
February 9: Blog Post
February 21: Ritual
March 9: Blog Post
March 22: Ritual
April 8: Blog Post
April 22: Ritual
May 7: Blog Post
May 20: Ritual
June 5: Blog Post
June 19: Ritual
July 5: Blog Post
August 17: Ritual
September 2: Blog Post