July 28/New Moon

musings on the end at the beginning of a lunation

not the new moon, but a moon none-the-less.

As I understand it, this is the time of the Lunation that menstruators and small children would gather together in the Red Tent and have their time apart from the rest of the world. I don’t have a source for this, unless you count The Red Tent by Anita Diamant which I read years ago when traveling to Israel. It’s a fictional account of the women of the Torah. I love this idea of retreat from the world. My mother-in-Law, Raleigh, who has been shomer shabbos(Do you remember this from the Big Lebowski?) for as long as I have known her, makes a retreat from the world every week. But, it’s a little different to make that retreat with family and obligations, while the other, a new moon retreat, is from family and obligations to the council of your fellow menstruators. To use a Hamilton song here, what I wouldn’t give to be in that room where it happens.

I am surrounded by sisters, so in a way I am in that room, although there is no formal timeframe on that and we are in various stages of menstruating. In addition, my mom has amassed a tribe of trusted women that she surrounded herself with and thankfully they are are still here to advise me. And of course, I have developed my own tribe of sorts and my own daughter and her tribe. And I can’t leave out that female energy in all the non-Menstruators I am surrounded by. Here’s to some day formalizing a new moon retreat to honor that.

The new moon marks the beginning and ending. I said this last week too, even though we had a week left in the cycle and that sense of completion was still coming. What was the elixir this last evolution of the moon around our planet had brought for us? Did you get ready for the end, in the same way you might get prepared for the beginning? My sister has pointed out, you don’t really need much to bring a baby home from the hospital and yet people prepare rooms and baby proof their houses, even though that need for child safety only grows along with each of the child’s developmental steps. The biggest danger with an infant is that they are not viable outside the mother’s body on their own, unlike most other animals that can get up and walk in minutes. And that’s the transition, the beginning is a separation when one body becomes two and mother and baby have to figure out how to live separately.

As we have experienced Hospice, with it’s care and supplies, bathing, and the shift in expected outcome, we have seen how it changes how you view everything. The preparing for an end requires the same amount of creation of space that a beginning might. The cleansing and bathing and letting go, a renewal of sorts. We are so used to arduous treatments in order to cure a disease, change our lives, our body, or homes, in some way. I have heard from lots of you about your experiences of hospice. How meaningful it is to have guidance and be surrounded by a particular way of caring as you face the inevitable. It seems that the quiet, the space, the slowness, the letting go of fixing and not doing, a task orientation to time, is a requirement to waking up the strength needed to face the end of things with integrity. My teacher Nancy has been saying this in yoga class, use mindful slow movements to wake up strength and integrity.

What is the meaning of exploring this at the new moon, at the beginning of a lunation? I’m not sure. I haven’t quite been able to return to the podcast. I want to but it is slow in coming. I have been in training this week as I am returning to an old job of data collection in schools. The last study that I was part of ended when the pandemic began, it had been with middle schoolers and now this one I will be going into high schools. I will tell you more as I go. For the time being, I leave you with this note on patience:

Patience is an enormously supportive and even magical practice. It’s a way of completely shifting the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by either going to the right or the left, labeling things “good” or labeling them “bad.” It’s the way to develop fearlessness, the way to contact the seeds of war and the seeds of lasting peace—and to decide which ones we want to nurture.

--Pema Chodron

More soon.

Much love. Tina