Don't Just Do Something, Sit There

New Milk Moon

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It is that darkest of dark time of the year when we review the year that just passed and begin to prepare for the one coming up. For the last three years I have done this in a more formal way and rather than making new years resolutions, I have gwished a theme for the upcoming year. As 2013 comes to a close the need for review of the old and gestation of the new is here again.

Part of a Tribe in the Spring

2013 was one hell of a year. The theme I set last January was Naming My Superpowers, Calling My Allies and it came with a wish and a hope to put my talents to good use and to build my community of allies to help with that work. I was looking for more discernment in my activities and my companions. I think I did a better job in 2013 than in previous years, but my skills of discernment clearly need more honing.

I didn't do as much blogging this year as in the past but going back through my Facebook feed allowed me to review the year in pretty good detail. Last winter and spring were amazing times of growth and exploration. I fell in love with an amazing man and we had some wonderful adventures together. Food, sex, conversations; it was mind and life expanding. My one blog post from this spring dates from this period and sums up a lot of my thinking during this time. And then my life exploded. That relationship fell apart and then I got very ill with a bacterial infection that took all the king's horses and all the king's men to put me back together again. The physical toll was great and the emotional toll was possibly greater. Emotions I didn't know I had overwhelmed me so I did what I am in the habit of doing.... more stuff. The late summer found me in another intense romantic relationship and then in an amazingly intense job. I got the middle school science teaching position I've been angling for for years and it is everything and more. This autumn has felt like a crisis time when everything is falling apart. My summer motto of 'better but not yet betterer' took on whole new levels of emotional and existential meaning. I wrote about my thinking along these lines in this post from late November. Apparently, it is 

Dolled Up Mid-Summer

difficult for my seventh grade students to be 12, but almost just as difficult for me to be thirty three.

Even with the major hiccup in the summer of being, ya know, almost dead for close to a month, I still followed my standard M.O. of going full speed ahead in 2013. I may have still had difficulty knowing what to say no to, but I had allies all along the way. My friends were amazing during my illness and recovery and I learned so much from the men I met and loved this year. Building community, or at least thinking about how to do it, was a major theme of this year. In my 2013 gwish post I used a photo with the african proverb, "if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together." I don't know how far I got, but I know I got there because of my friends this year.

During this time of gestating my intentions for 2014 I have employed many of my traditional gwishing techniques. I drew a tarot spread, listened for resonance with colors, images, animals and phrases. I thought about what I wanted and what I did not want from this upcoming year and finally, after weeks of thinking and listening, found my theme for the year.

2014, Don't Just Do Something, Sit There.

By Sharon Flowers

The phrase is a title of a book by Sylvia Boorstein, a Buddhist teacher I first heard through Krista Tippet's amazing interview with her. It is a joke, a play on words, a phrase that always makes me chuckle and smile wryly. You're right, you're right, I know you're right I mutter as the phrase pops into my head. In the last few years I have cultivated my doing self and have learned so much from that, but as I continued doing and did not feel any better about my life it became more frantic and obsessive. In a particularly dark moment of this last autumn I was on a date with a gentleman caller, drinking beer, talking about politics, looking forward to our adult sleepover, when my internal commentator noted, "Dang, girlfriend, you got this doing-and-not-feeling thing down to a science!" That frantic doing has metastasized into uncontrollable worry and anxiety this winter and I feel miserable much of the time. And it is all so boring. It is the same stupid patterns I've had for years but now that I see them they are achey and dull, not even succeeding at what they were designed to do.

I did draw a tarot spread this winter (and will talk more about it below) but this year my theme came a lot from listening for resonance with words and images. The blue heron, a patient and stealthy hunter, will be my theme animal for this 

By David Jakes

year. Herons sit still as a tree waiting for their prey to forget they're there. They work hard to not spook off the good stuff that will surely come their way. Like herons, chicory flowers have been making themselves known to me for years. They are the weediest of the weedy plants and will grow out of sidwalks, along highways, in gravel drives and on the edges of lawns. It is used for salad greens, livestock forage, a coffee subsitute and a medicine for all sorts of ailments. The gorgeous blue flowers are said to be able to open locked doors. Powerful allies to have in this year of bravely facing the habits of mind and heart that rear their head in physical and mental stillness.

Other symbols of stillness and introspection have come to work with me. The first was an unlikely and ancient copper Buddha found in Helgo, a Viking town dating to about 800 C.E. The small, beautifully worked statue appears to have been made about two to three hundred years earlier in northern India and then worked its way through trade and capture this important center of Viking trade. 1500 years after it was made and thousands of miles away, the Buddha continues to be a visual representation of the ability of humans to achieve some kind of peace. This Buddha is a conundrum,

The Helgo Buddha

 though, because this statue has traveled so far away from where it started. Like the heron who can spread its 7 foot wing span to find a better pond or stream and the weedy chicory that has hitched rides with humans to all ends of the earth, the Helgo Buddha has traveled but not lost it's stillness. My tarot card for the year is the Hermit, another character travels with stillness. This Hermit card came at the end of a spread full of winged hearts, this is the cups suit in my Fairy Tale Tarot deck. This suit is correlated with emotions, dreams and the moon and the winged heart itself is a Sufi symbol for unconditional love and devotion. My spread indicated that work must be done finding or giving support and unity in this realm before connection and healing can happen. Then those powers of love can be used to help others, fight for what is right and increase the true wealth of love in this world.

• 2014 will be green like old copper and healthy trees, grey like heron feathers, carved stones and a hermit-wizard's cloak, blue like summer skies and weedy chicory flowers. 
• 2014 will be a year of answering the phone with "What fresh hell is this?" and hoping it really is a new problem rather than the reheated boring problems I have seen before.
• 2014 will be a year of knowing what to keep and what to let go. It will be a year of cultivating Right Memory (seeing the patterns but facing the world fresh), of Right Heart (Finding new ways of love while releasing obsessive and painful habits) and Right Attention (now that I don't have to be perfect, I can be good). 
• 2014 will be a year of attending to my people, building patterns of connection and of swirling round and round with others who want to dance. It will be a time of building the world I want; don't just sit there, do something.

This last gwish is based on my Sabian symbol for 2014, Gemini 22: Dancing Couples Crowd the Barn in a Harvest Festival. The first part of my theme for this year is all about finding peace and joy in stillness, introspection and changing my own patterns of thought and feeling about the world. This symbol and gwish provide the other side of this coin, that of cultivating peace and joy through healthy connection with other people. My best friends and I are working out plans for a game night of sorts, an attempt to build our friend community back up into fruitful health, a project streaming directly out of my work at calling my allies last year. The allies have been called, now they need to connect with each other into a true caring community. This symbol brings to mind ceremonial times out of the daily grind of work to connect, enjoy and celebrate the turning of the seasons. In addition to our game night, I think this image is calling me to 

New Years Day 2014

find ways to connect in my church and school communities as well as rekindle my connection to the wheel of the year through blogging and celebrations. 

Many of my friends found 2013 to be an exceptionally challenging year. Some have much more painful horror stories from this year than I do but my year was hard. I was sick, I was heartbroken and I struggled a lot with uncovering truths about who I am and how I operate. I did have moments of pure bliss, wild adventures and times of deep connection. 2014 will be a year of more discernment, more stillness, more interesting problems and more dancing joyfully in the stream of the cosmos. I for one am looking forward to it. 

* Full text of Gemini 22: DANCING COUPLES CROWD THE BARN IN A HARVEST FESTIVAL

When achievements have been made and there is a sense of security and 'Harvest' in the air, it is time to celebrate with one another. There is a need to get back to a simple, conservative level of enjoyment. There's a sense of being in tune with seasonal rhythms. The feeling of a healthy heart and a healthy mind, while taking a break from the struggles of providing, can bring joy to everyone involved. See if you can take time out to celebrate and to enjoy your environment.

Celebrating the warmth and providence of the Earth. The joy of nature's harvest. Joining with others to celebrate. The reality of rhythmical or seasonal adjustments. Dancing. Barns and dance halls.

The Caution: Being the wallflower, not participating. Waiting for a special invitation rather than responding to the openness of the situation.

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New Milk Moon 2009: New Milk Moon

New Milk Moon 2010: Forty Two with a Seventy Percent Chance of Rain

New Milk Moon 2011: The Quaker Year

New Milk Moon 2012: Year of the Dragon

This post is a New Year's Gwishing post. Be sure to check out previous year's posts: 2011 Building a Better Teacher, 2012 Grabbing the Tiger By the Tail and 2013 Engaging My Superpowers, Calling My Allies. There are older and other New Years day posts under the label New Year.

City and Sky Advent

This is a special note to let you know about my other writing project for the month of December. I am making an online Advent calendar of sorts and publishing a short piece every day this month. My regular readers here will probably not be too shocked at what they find - Pagan Quaker Hippy Scientist Nerdilicious goodness. I hope you will stop by and check it out!

http://cityandskyadvent.blogspot.com

Winter

The Year Ends

Old Sorting Moon

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I always like it when my human affairs line up nicely with natural cycles and seasonal change. There was a full moon on October 29th that marked the height of the Sorting Moon, the last month of the lunar year, and also happened to fall right at the end of my Outdoor School session. As the last week of the Sorting Moon came and went so did the last week of Outdoor School and right as I was packing and getting ready to leave the coast for the last time, winter showed up. I honestly felt like I left the coast in the autumn and arrived in Portland in the winter with cold air, cold rain and bare trees. 

Smith Lake during the last week of camp

Daylight savings that week made the transition all that much more abrupt. It is now the dark, cold, wet time of the year. 

The end of the Sorting Moon also the end of my fourth year of blogging at The Wheel and the Disk. Holy cow! Really, four years? As I look back over my work this year I see that the 2011-2012 lunar year was a busy (er, totally crazy) one, but there is a lot here that I am very proud of.

At the beginning of the year I was struggling heavily with my work as a student teacher. I struggled with that hard work and other hard work that came up over the winter. At the beginning of the lunar year, I set the goal of working with material from Jessica Prentice's book Full Moon Feast and some of my best writing this year came out of my engagement with that material. The posts about the Wolf Moon and the Sap Moon are shining examples of the kind of writing I do best - an eclectic mix of explanation, spiritual musing and connection making. In the deep winter I did some gwishing and set a theme for 2012 - Grabbing the Tiger By the Tail - which has manifested itself in all sorts of ways I didn't even imagine were possible. The craziness of the rest of the year was foreshadowed by my messing up on the naming of my moons in the winter and having to realign the posts and dates months later. As the spring waxed my focus shifted outward and my posts tended to get shorter, more full of poetry, and more full of pronoic epiphanies. It simply was not a season for digestion or self reflection. It was a time for adventures! In the summer I told you about my adventures in dogs, men, soccer and theme parties. Man, I sure had fun this summer. The fun didn't end, though, as I moved to Outdoor School and enjoyed autumn 

Wondering what tha?

on the Oregon coast. I may not have posted twice for each month, but I did post once for every moon and considering how much else got pushed aside this year I consider that an accomplishment. 

I'm not sure what I see in the future of this blog. It is clearly a very important tool for me in my self reflection and continued spiritual practice. I look forward to spending the winter really digesting the work (and play!) that I engaged in over this last warm season. I would like to continue to incorporate stories and poetry to help illuminate my findings as well as to highlight the science of the seasons as they come and go. I expect to have another very fruitful winter of blogging and hope that I can sustain that into the spring and summer next year. Again, I promise to post for every moon and every festival. That commitment keeps me on track in a very real way. 

I have been enjoying this change in the season and the beginnings of this season of dark. This soli-lunar calendar that I follow allows for a generous season of end before the birth of the new year and I have grown accustomed to using it for all it is worth. Reviewing, putting things to rest, sorting through and making ready to let go or spend the winter working of what needs to stay. It is a fruitful season for inner work and I need some of that brand of medicine right now. How is the year winding down for you? What have you accomplished since last fall? What of that is worth keeping and what of that is ready to be transformed into something worth keeping? How is winter beginning to show itself where you live?

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This post is labeled Old Sorting Moon because it was written so late in the month. Here are previous Full Sorting Moon posts. 

Full Sorting Moon 2011: Snow Moon: Connecting with our Food

Full Sorting Moon 2010: The Rains Have Come and Year Two Complete

Full Sorting Moon 2009: Full Sorting Moon

The End of the Year

New Death Moon

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I just started my student teaching this week, or my "pre service teaching" as my University likes to call it (student teaching sounds too wimpy, they argue), and have been placed at a very small school in a rural community about an hour from my house. The early morning wake up is hellish, and the predawn drive a bit harrowing, but the school is very good and my cooperating teachers are going to work out really well. The real upside, besides finally getting into a classroom and beginning to actually teach, is my afternoon drives back through the farming country of the Willamette Valley. This is the land people crossed the mountains and deserts to get to, and still are, in fact (the town of Woodburn, about 40 minutes south of Portland, is the largest community in Oregon with over 50% of the population claiming Hispanic heritage). It is a beautiful country full of farms, fields and forests.

As I have been driving back and forth this week I have been noticing just how "done" the agricultural year is in the Willamette Valley. At the hop farms north of Woodburn the vines are all down and the tall support structures empty for the winter. There are many small farm stands along the way with signs up that say "Closed for the Winter", their vegetable patches empty and muddy. Alfalfa fields are mown and the rows of berry bushes are turning crimson and gold in the chilly nights. Higher up, closer to my school, most of the fields are either Christmas tree farms or horse, sheep or cattle pastures which are changing their character for the winter, too. The tall weeds are blackening and the grass is low and wet, just hanging on until spring. Horses have blankets on to ward off the chill and the sheep are woolly with their thick winter coats. One field of sheep has a guard llama in it and it took me two days to figure out exactly what that giant, woolly beast was. Everything is done growing and either dying back or just settling in for the winter. The people who work the land are settled in, too, or have moved on to other places where harvests are still happening. The land is just holding it's breath until the storms of winter come and, later, the renewal of spring.

It's the end of the cycle here at The Wheel and the Disk, too. This post marks the beginning of my fourth year of blogging. Again, this year, I posted for the new and full moon of every single month of the year plus at least one post for each eight solar holidays. In fact, I posted quite a few more posts than that, including two posts that were published in my Quaker Meeting's journal (here, and here) and two posts for Pagan Values Blogging Month (here, and here). Again, I celebrated Ramadan by finding meaningful information about Muslims, Islam and Ramadan and sharing it with my Facebook friends and then with you here at The Wheel and the Disk. My writings this year did an excellent job of highlighting the eclectic mix of inspiration I gather my own thinking from, including Quakers (and here, too), Catholics (and here, too), Buddhist stories, Greek mythology, Waldorf thought and practice and more modern stories, to name just a few. Some of my favorite posts from this year are the stories I wrote about Johnny Appleseed and Krishna and the Gopis. Neither of these stories are truly original - the plot and characters are as old as old can be - but I took them into my own self and brought them back out as original retellings.

This next year will be hard for me. One week into student teaching and I am already exhausted and overwhelmed. I wonder how this blog will fare when my time is so much more dedicated to teaching. I hope to keep writing both for myself and for you. I have seen my own thinking about the topics I explore deepen and broaden over the course of these three years and I want to keep exploring as long as I can. Next year, I would love to incorporate thoughts from another excellent book I have that is organized around the lunar months, Jessica Prentice's Full Moon Feast. She talks about seasonal food, community and connection through the lens of the seasonal round of moons. I think bringing this focus to my thinking, practicing and writing would be a wonderful challenge to align my life with my ideals about safe, sustainable and healthful food. I will take the year of blogging one step at a time, but promise to post something for each full and new moon, even if it is just a note or a photo.

As the land readies itself for the deep of winter, so do we. It is time to light our lanterns off the spark Michael took off the dying sun just those few weeks ago. It is time to bundle up, cuddle up and turn inward. Our season in the sun, expanded out towards the cosmos, has brought us a treasure trove of knowledge, now is the time to spend time working that into wisdom, as the gnomes work the sun's sparkling light into crystals during the winter.

How are you noticing the end of the year? What did you do in the last 12 months that you are most proud of, or from the last cycle you completed whether it took shorter or longer than 12 months? What wisdom did you bring back from your journeying and how are you lighting your lantern for the winter ahead? How has this blog touched you and your thinking? What would you like to see me think about, change or add next year? What was your favorite post from this last year?

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** This winter was tough and I got messed up in my calendar. This post was written at the right time for the right moon, but there are other posts dated the same time about a differen moon. What tha? Where was I?? For more on my thoughts about this, see this post. **
New Death Moon 2008: Time is a Circle

New Death Moon 2009: The Soldier and Death (another one of my all time favorite posts. I absolutely love this story, and am quite fond of my own retelling of it :)

New Death Moon 2010: Night and Day

I reviewed my first year of blogging at The Full Sorting Moon and my second year a Year Two Complete!

Year Two Complete!

Can you believe it? I've been blogging at The Wheel and the Disk for two who years! I am so proud of myself for seeing this project through so far. I am also really excited to continue on this next year and excited to learn more about those of you who are here with me on this journey.

I feel like I have learned so much and the blog has been a really valuable creative outlet for me. In this second year of blogging I have been successful in posting for every month and every festival, sometimes more than the "required" new moon, full moon and festival posts. I love all the stories and poems I have included this year, and am especially proud of my own creative writing. Lovely Luz, my February First story from last winter, is one I am especially proud of. I learned all 8 festival names years ago when I was first learning about neo-pagan practice and am happy to report that I can now name all 13 months in this Soli-Lunar calendar as well. 

The third time through anything is the time when you really feel you have mastery of something. I am excited to draw on my writings from the last two years and do some more synthesis of my thoughts about each month and festival this year, while leaving room for whatever comes up or whatever perks my interest. My Ramadan post, though not strictly within the structure of this calendar, is one of my favorite posts from last year. Starting with the New Death Moon post later this week I will be adding links to each post to the corresponding posts from previous years. This should be an easy way to let all of us look back on my past thoughts on the moon or festival and start to see reoccurring themes.

I would also, this year, learn more about who is out there reading this blog. Last month as I went through the process of writing a personal mission statement I wrote the statement "I will develop and nurture relationships with people I can be open with about my relationship with god and who are actively cultivating their own relationship." Just the fact that you are reading my blog you are someone I want to connect with and nourish a relationship with. I am not writing this blog to you or specifically for you, but I am also not just writing it for myself. If I was doing that I would make it private and not risk baring my personal thoughts to the world.

If you are a follower of my blog, or even a casual reader of my blog, I would love to hear from you! Comment on this post and let me know what you love about my blog and what you want to see more of. Leave me a link to your blog and I will be sure to read it and comment. Share what nourishes your connection with the natural cycles and divine influences. Share your favorite recipe or a beloved poem.

So here we go, year three. The wheel turns, and moon waxes and wanes, the sun's energy ebbs and flows. And I keep writing.