Making Manifest the Dream of Winter: A Full Moon Ritual
“In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you. ”
In the out-of-the-way places of the heart, where your thoughts never think to wander, a beginning has been forming—waiting until you are ready to emerge. As we stand beneath the glow of March’s Full Moon, the last full moon of winter and a full lunar eclipse, we are met with the dawn of a new beginning. One which is informed by the depths of the story of our winter.
This moment in time is like the first light upon waking from a dream, where we grasp for the threads of something profound before it slips away. And so, we reach back into the dreamtime of winter and ask: What must be made real?
There's an inherent “readiness” in spring, because as rhythmic beings who have evolved with the cycles of Earth, it's hardwired in us to viscerally feel the when when spring begins to shake the snow off of its wings. We also shake the stagnancy from our minds and our bodies. I love the personification of the new beginning as some entity that has been waiting for us. It is our embodied story that has been dreamed into us, that is waiting for us to take action and to live it. Waiting for us to step out of the safety and comfort of the nest, the cocoon, the den of winter, and into this new beginning.
Remembering the dream, and living the dream into the world, is how life regenerates. It is a reflection of what the natural world is doing; every spring, the plants live into the dream of the seed that once laid dormant underground all winter. The Bulbs of the perennials lie waiting in the dream of their own DNA, until the warmth of the sun wakes them up. The caterpillar goes into the cocoon and turns to goo and waits and dreams until the imaginal cells, which have known the final form of the butterfly since the very beginning, awaken to what they are meant to become. We, too, have an opportunity to ask ourselves if if are willing to be brave enough, hopeful enough, and foolish enough to try to live into that dream.
“I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.”
The Archetype of the Fool: The Courage to Begin
Spring is ruled by the fool—the part of us that is willing to take risks, to embrace newness with wonder and trust. Beginnings require foolishness, a willingness to be made a fool in the process of discovery. The medicine of the fool is that they don’t have to take life so seriously, no matter how big the dream. It takes bravery—and just the right amount of foolishness—to turn toward the tremendous things that we're being called into in this lifetime by the dream.
It requires a certain amount of hope and bravery and foolishness, a willingness to say yes to the danger, say yes to being made into a fool in the process of discovering how to make manifest, because we're not going to do it right the first time. We're probably going to bumble through the process of bringing the dream into reality, in fact. There's no doubt about that, but the alternative is so much worse than making a fool of yourself or doing it wrong, because the alternative is far more terrifying.
Too often, we hear the voices that try to keep us small. The inner critic, the perfectionist, and the voiced of internalized racism, patriarchy and colonialism. These voices whisper of fear: What if you fail? What if you lose stability? Those that whisper of unworthiness. But the truth is, to live disconnected from our dreams, and to therefore never act upon them, is to live an unlived life.
If the dream dies in the womb, it can't be birthed into the world to create positive impact, to be made real by its relationality with the rest of life, the rest of the ecosystem in which you are woven into. This is how we rewild: Is to take the dream, to take the whisperings of a calling, of a desire, of a longing—an authentic one that is Earth rooted, Soul rooted, heart rooted—and coaxing it to the surface, out of the imagination and into reality.
The dream has been growing within us, waiting for us to step forward. We have spent a season in deep listening—now is the time to bring our visions into form. This is the work of spring: the weaving of desire into action, the dream into reality.
What Is the Dream?
Living your dream is not a selfish thing. When I speak of the dream. I'm speaking about that which arrives at your doorstep, whether you like it or not, because life has something to show you. When I'm talking about the dream, I'm talking about the dreams that come to us at night and rock our understanding of ourselves and life itself.
I am not speaking of “dreaming” as wishful thinking or personal ambition. When I speak of the dream, I mean the quiet knowing that arrives unbidden. The moment of clarity that comes while walking alone or driving on a long straight highway through the desert. The pull toward something deeper—something that feels more like home than anything else. The calling that does not let go.
To live the dream is an act of participation with life. It is an acknowledgment that our visions are not separate from the earth but part of its rhythm. Like the perennial bulbs that have been lying dormant, waiting for warmth to stir them awake, we too must answer the call to rise. To keep it in the dream, boxed up and pretty and safe, does a disservice to yourself and the world.
“Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream that you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.”
A Dream from the Wasteland
Some dreams stay with us, surfacing again and again, demanding to be heard. One such dream came to me years ago, and I have been walking with it ever since.
In this dream, I traveled through a vast, barren wasteland—an echo of a world that once thrived but had been hollowed out by relentless progress. There was no life. At my side was an old, dying man, fragile and slow, yet carrying a deep well of stories within him. As we journeyed together, he whispered these stories into my ear. I could not fully grasp them, yet I knew they held something vital—something that must not be lost.
We crossed empty cities, abandoned roads, and a great ocean until we arrived at an underground sanctuary. Below the earth, there was life—people tending to seeds, waiting for the right moment to plant them. I carried the old man through this place, emerged back into the world above, where I delivered him into the hands of those who would continue to listen.
For years, this dream has lived within me. Each time I return to the dream, it reveals itself in new ways that I must choose to live into. To listen to the stories of the dying wild. To eat grief and tend the seeds of something new. To allow this dream to go unlived feels like a disservice to not only all of life, but also all that is dying. I don't know exactly how to enact that, not in a perfect way at any rate, but it feels too important to not try.
The dream doe not have to be gran dios or elaborate. Reaching back into your winter, into your story, to pull at the threads of something deep within you could be simple, too. It could be a thread of longing for solitude so that I can allow my muse to run wild on a sheet of paper. So what might that dream look like lived, evoked, invoked? How do you show up in your belonging to the world and to your life, so that you honor that dream, so that you don't betray yourself in honoring your humanness?
“Whoever listens in this silence, as she listens,
will also stand opened, thoughtless, frightened
by the joy she feels, the pathway in the field
branching to a hundred more, no one has explored.
What is called in her rises from the ground
and is found in her body,
what she is given is secret even from her.
This silence is the seed in her
of everything she is
and falling through her body
to the ground from which she comes,
it finds a hidden place to grow
and rises, and flowers, in old wild places,
where the dark-edged sickle cannot go.”
Full Moon Journaling Prompts
What new beginning is calling to me, even if I don’t fully understand it yet?
Reaching back into the dream of my winter, what longs to be lived through me?
What fears or doubts try to keep me small?
If I were to live my dream into the world, what would that look like?
What small, tangible step can I take to make this dream real?
Full Moon Ritual:
You will need:
A candle
A bowl of water
A piece of paper and a pen
A quiet space
1. Set the Space: Light a candle and sit in a quiet space. Take a few deep breaths, centering yourself and connecting with the earth below you, and the moon above you.
2. Write: On the paper, write down the dream you are being called to live—the desire that has been stirring within you. The new beginning that has been courting you all winter. It does not have to be fully clear. Set a timer for 15 minutes and free-write all the ways you can be and act in a way that enacts it and makes it real.
4. Release Fear: Read through what you wrote. What fears, worries, or concerns arise when you imagine yourself truly leaning into this new beginning? Give each voice the space to speak. Write their worries, fears, concerns, criticisms, and remarks. When you are done, acknowledge to these voices within you that you understand that they are trying to keep you safe. Explain to them (out loud or written) that you have a more important task ahead, a vision that you long to live into, that you can no longer stay small and silent for. Acknowledge the places where colonization, systemic racism, and internalized patriarchy are present and affecting your ability to cross the threshold into the new beginning. If there is anything intuitively that feels like it is ready for release, you may write it down on a scrap of paper and burn it over the bowl of water.
5. Call upon your Resources: Write your intention for this new beginning and enactment of the dream from the perspective of the Fool or the Innocent One. The one within you who is connected with hope, playfulness, humor, and just the right amount of foolishness.
6. Close the Ritual: Blow out the candle and offer gratitude to yourself and the land you sit upon.