June 26/First Quarter Moon

On intentions and conventions, trip preparations, boredom and dream yoga.

Writing in the heat with fans and ice tea and 24 years or so under our belt. More writing soon, I promise.

I lead my posts with the moon.

Starting right away with the title.

Today’s date and the current primary phase, that has been my titling convention.

My intention is to track the moon’s phase for myself, but also for you, so you get a heads up in your inbox with each primary phase and you don’t even need to open them up to have that relationship with the moon’s travels as well. But I’m glad you do open, thank you. I get a pretty good open rate around here.

I frequently wonder if it is time to change my titling convention. The next couple summer months of abbreviated posting will see the titles remaining the same but also give me some time to decide how they might change. For those of you that have been around for a good long while now (Thank you so much for sticking around through thick and thin🙏🏼), what is your response to the titles when you see them in your inbox? Have you used them the way intended? Do they grow old? For those of you that are new around here (Welcome😍), how will you relate to them? I’d love to hear from each of you and thanks to those of you that have been responding to my questions and searching already - emails, in person - your reflections of what you see/experience mean so much.

It’s been 9 days since the new moon, when I posted last. It is the shape of the moon’s highly elliptical orbit around the earth that causes the large fluctuations in the timing between primary phases. During perigee, when the moon is closest to the Earth, like now, we get longer lunations. Sometimes that extra lag time between phases is a gift.

On Trip Preparations

We will be departing on the day I post next — Full Moon — on our roadtrip/camping trip heading west

Physically: I thought I was doing well with this. In addition to my daily yoga and breathing practice, walking everyday. Getting the miles in so that my legs were trail ready, but with the ups and downs of our recent hiking in the BWCA, so different than city walking, and the squatting required to pee out-of-doors, I found that my knees weren’t. I have had to cut back on the miles to let my knees heal and add in quad and glute exercises to help stabilize and a new soma-yoga routine. My knees feel much better. And I am nervous about the hiking.

It is an aspiration of mine to age with grace. I feel like I have so many beautiful examples in my life of older women who’s wisdom and beauty I’d like to grow into. It is part of my motivation to practice. So generally I feel agile and solid, except when troubles like sore knees come up.

I have posted this before, but instead of tracing it back to that original post, I will include it again here. A reminder to keep practicing, wherever you are, whatever you have coming up, your actions are your only true belongings, they are the ground upon which you stand.

Here are the 5 Remembrances of the Buddha as translated by Thich Nhat Hanh:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Newsletter-wise: I have a plan. Mom’s Journal will post for the new moon. Watch out for that. It has its own title and is coming through a new section of Songs of Forgiveness. And as for the rest, I will set posts in advance for our westward pilgrimage to Dad’s scattering and in each will post a photo and sentence a day for our trip. This is inspired by my fellow Substack writer, Chris LaTray of An Irritable Métis’ practice. That will gets us to the next New Moon after which I will post a bit about magic.

On Boredom in Writing

When I graduated from my MFA program I was 8 months pregnant with my daughter and my son was nearly 3 and 1/2. My first published piece of creative non-fiction was about that crazy time of writing and teaching and parenting. It was about the chaos of creation and my lack of control over it. I sometimes wonder if that writing not only described what I was experiencing but enshrined it.

So upon receiving my degree as I was about to have baby #2, I took a hiatus. I declared my break from writing would be 3 years. I birthed said child and never looked back, until my self-prescribed 3 years grace period was up.

True to my agreement with myself, I came back to writing. It’s been almost 21 years since then to the day.

But it was hard coming back. I had lost all my writing muscles. I had no interest or confidence and I found that in the rare times that I would have a moment to pick up a pen, I would get so bored that I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The boredom has come back again.

As I learned then, boredom only resolves itself by drawing interest in. This has been a time for that.

On Dream Yoga

This follows from the above on boredom. I have been drawing my interest there as well. When I try to grasp the dream, putting words on it so that I can put it in my notebook, it eludes me. My mind fills itself with its descriptions, no room left for the dream itself and so it is gone, unreachable. But when I play in that borderland between sleep and awake, I float between the two worlds aware of both, participating in neither, its mine and I can see how things work. So I am practicing the float right now.

Life is but a dream and here I am doing my best to stay lucid in it.

Much Love, Tina