New Moon: consolation

honoring a life well lived

Karlene and I at the Nordic museum at the Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People exhibit which is coming to the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, Feb 4 to May 26th, 2024. Photo credits Becka.

Today begins the first lunation of 2024.

How does one finish up the last lunation? In my world, the last lunation brought the end of 2023, the holiday season with its holiday visits, Covid, and, included within its circle, was the winter solstice and the passing of my stepsister Karlene into the great hereafter.

Pictured below is the Moon Journal with some questions for you to consider:

Third Quarter Moon prompt page from Moon Journal, available in Slideshow Sisters Etsy shop. My suggestions are to take the questions lightly. Take notes, revisit the notes at each successive lunation, doodle your additions to them as you understand them better. Let this practice integrate process into your life, integrate new perspectives, transform how you experience the construct of time.

Do the questions work with what I am called to do now? Do I even want what is offered? When things come to an end, how do we pick up our lives and continue on?

Karlene was a big sister’s big sister. She and I, each big sisters in our own right, from way before we became sisters to each other, treated the other as the big sister we never had growing up. I turned to her with questions, both in the minutia, as in how to punctuate (she was an awesome editor), and with questions about the entirety, we discussed life and practice and ultimate truths.

For over two years, she had been fighting for her life. As Aunt Sandee said in her condolence, she fought so hard to be here for her family. And that was very true, she was very present for us all, often physically she had to miss things during her illness, but she always was present with her beautiful heart and mind. The long haul of the fighting took a great toll on her precious body. May that mean that now that she is released from her struggle, and so is all that healing and loving energy, which will now bolster the world she cared so much about.

The following are a few stories that I want to capture.