I lived on the coast of Oregon in 2005.  Waited tables and tended bar at a roadside steakhouse run by a guy from Jersey.  My buddy Paul, satisfied with his girls being raised rightly, put on a backpack back then and took a bus to the coast from Eugene where he had been living.  He got a job at the steakhouse too and started his life over, just like me.

He called Sunday.  It made me so happy.

Bravery is something Paul lives.  The willingness to consider his life honestly and make choices in support of his truths.  That’s how synchronicity happens–those little magic doors that open when we didn’t even know one was there.

Paul counsels people up at Breitenbush where he works and lives as a full-time resident.

He called to astound over the great, painful passing we all just went through.

Ever since that time in Oregon, I feel like Life uses him to remind me that this moment is exactly as it ought to be.

Have you ever heard the song The View by Modest Mouse I asked him.  It’s been non-stop going through my head lately.  While we were on the phone I looked out the window to see a hummingbird dipping in and out of the big Tupperware that I use to turn my old food into soil.  This pretty little delicate bird, harbinger of joy according to indigenous belief, buzzing all around my compost.  If it takes shit to make bliss, I’m living pretty blissfully.  That’s the chorus for the song.  I laughed to tell him about life lately, and turning shit into bliss.

And that’s so true!  Mercury came out of retrograde, and the Spring Equinox (and SOOO many of us getting sick!!) happened.  That was our passing from the season of dark into light and it seems we all had so, so much to assimilate.

There was a full moon just days after the Equinox. Full moons are the center of a cycle–so all that fuuuunk stirred up by the retro still had momentum even after it passed because of where the moon was.  Paul’s call reminded me: this too passes.  

That passing brought about Spring.  

New Moon

So last week was the New Moon.  Old myths and stories used to say that the moon went to the underworld, or died, when it was new because it disappeared from the sky.   That’s good symbolism to remember.  Because the new moon does mark the end of a cycle.  

This past one  marked the end of a cycle with a retrograde that marked the end of winter, so it contained everything we all just lived through during our own personal seasons of dark.

New moon is also the beginning.   This moon finally ushered in the pure elemental experiences of Spring!

Spring is Fire.  Fire transforms, right?  Whatever it touches–whether cooking something on a slow simmer or burning something to ash.  It changes things.  Spring fire is Cardinal, all about potential!  Cooking up what’s new by burning off what we no longer need.  

With last weeks new moon, that is the cycle we’ve finally begun.

Our lives within follow the rhythms outside.  The natural world is transforming all the old shit into beautiful new growth.  Horay!