We are socked in this month, almost every morning a blank fog sits til 12 like this were San Fransisco.  Maybe in the night my dreams of mountains and ebony-green came true?  In the dull moments of morning I am held by something meangingful, strung together in pre-cellphone reach scraps, if I were north again...Northern land rushes to encompass, smells of conifer trees.  This of course is not the case.  I get on here to chart my truth: I itch, I am itching.  Always the next great escape…

I am Southern Californian, transplant, maker of new home.  This is the risk I guess.  An adventrurer’s spirit always has so much to gain.  In equal parts there is moderation, the psyche’s covert need to comb over all there has been to lose.

Just one brief moment.  Surfacing, is that the surface I near?   I raise my head:  school grants a grace period of a month but this is fallacy.  We actually have two papers due and three online courses so this is not a break.   There’s just one quiet month, silent with the freedom of not needing to travel to Montecito for class.  For the first time in 25 years I return to Catholic Mass.  Peace settles over me from some long-touched requisite.  It seeps and spreads through my body.  It is a long stretch.  It is a sigh in hot beach sand.  It feels dangerous and I want to stop it.  I think then of how the end of yoga used to feel and instead grab for my moment: Breath.

The Priest is round in robes of kelly-green and I project all over him how I imagine he will be.  Cruel, cold.  Deliver of what is harsh.  I also forget this is how the ritual starts, with the alter boys in white coming down the aisle, in the lead.  There is no inscence and the only kneelers are in the front row.  It is several moments before I realize the tinkling sound of the fountain in the baptismal pool.  I ache to be up front in supposition.  We sing Come, now is the time to worship and I am embarrassed.  On the other side of my breath are tears.

On Saturday Sepi prepared an Iranian feast and held an ancestor ritual for me.  We sat in a circle, there is a traditional Persian word for this, on her floor.  Me, Chris, a space for my aunt dead now a year, and Sep.  I was stunned by the amount of tears.  The wordless, rattling, wicked grief.  I almost moved home.  Back to Maryland, the Eastern Shore.  I would have had the position at the shelter, the women’s group where I felt so called, not fallen through.

It is the work of the soul to which I always respond.  So it is in my most dust-filled moments, in the middle of a taskless fog, I go to and struggle with, circle the gate round and round again, only to finally, finally, take up the pen.

The full moon is in Leo, second harvest moon, a quickening as Beth pointed out Thursday.   Our intuition is heightenend on a mass level as the powerful Leo fixed fire smolders almost to a purified point one no longer deniable from within.  Virgo will bring the changing quality of earth, of what we are here to manifest by making subtle changes to what already is–changes that began to be made obvious to us during this time since the last new moon.  Life is never black and white, even if during this month that is how it has felt.  But I also feel the move, I open my hands.  It is fluid, not the in breath, not the out breath, not even the still point of sacred in-between.

I feel the seeds in this harvest moon.  Seeds that fall from the palm, born from that which, even at its peak, has already begun to let go of what it no longer is.  Seeds that yearn towards what next…what could be.