Waking Up: A Ritual for the New Moon in Pisces
As we enter this Pisces New Moon on February 28th, we find ourselves in the space of waking up.
Waking up from the deep slumber of winter as spring begins to stir and the birds return. Waking up from complacency as we witness rapid shifts being made in our world that affect all beings. Waking up from the depths of our shadow, our dreaming, our hibernation—to feeling, sensation, intention, and aliveness.
While spring is not quite here, we are in a time that feels like the first light of dawn after a long night. We have not yet tumbled into the season of action. However, we are poised to gaze back at all the transformation, healing, and dreaming that we have done this winter, balancing on a precipice where we can grasp all of that wisdom and allow it to inform our intentions for the next year-long cycle. This is Persephone's ascent back to Earth from the underworld, where she transformed from maiden to queen. We, too, emerge from our own darkness and dreaming with a deeper intimacy with our own power and self-knowledge.
So, we gently flutter the eyes open, take a stretch, and look around at our surroundings. We linger in this delicate moment of waking, so that we might remember the dream of winter, the underworld, the descent into the holy and fertile dark. This moment is tender, where the dream may slip away from memory if we move too quickly.
This is how we rewild: by trusting the dream as we wake, no matter how off-kilter and wild. To remember. To not only be dreamed by something greater, but to live the dream. To infuse our intentions with the dream. To emerge from the deep sleep of winter nourished, empowered, more mature, more connected, more rooted, more self-aware—and to let those qualities serve the pursuit of our own soulful and creative becoming.
“In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?”
This new moon is about honoring the depth, the gifts, the potent lessons that can only be retrieved by going into the dark places within. By wintering. By touching the source. By going through unfathomably challenging experiences, not because they are objectively painful experiences, but because the experience touches the most tender part of who you are. This is how we rewild: trusting life enough to allow ourselves to experience life through our own tenderness. By remembering that “more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began,” and carrying the gifts from that place forward like our lives depend on it. It is “to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world.”
A Moon Ritual for Waking Up
1. Create your Space: Clean your space so that your nervous system can relax. Create an altar and light a candle. Take 10-20 breaths in silence, allowing the entirety of who you are to fully arrive.
2. Grounding Meditation: Find a quiet space to sit or lie down. Close your eyes. Imagine roots growing from the base of your spine or the soles of your feet, connecting you to the earth. With each inhale, imagine drinking in Earth Mother’s unconditional love. Feel into your belonging to her, belonging in the body and upon the earth. With each exhale, send gratitude into the Earth through your roots, sharing your own love with the land.
3. Journaling Prompts:
As you wake from the long slumber of winter, what messages, lessons, or transformations from the past season feel most vital to carry forward? How can you honor them before they slip away like a dream upon waking?
You are standing at the precipice between winter’s introspection and spring’s emergence. What does this threshold feel like in your body, heart, and mind? What energies are stirring within you, preparing to move from stillness into action?
If winter’s dreaming was a seed planted deep in the soil, what is the wild, unfiltered vision trying to emerge from you now? How can you trust it, even if it feels untamed, unformed, or unfamiliar?
Like Persephone, you have traveled through an underworld of transformation. What parts of yourself feel more sovereign, wise, or mature because of this journey? How will you carry this newfound power into the world?
Rather than rushing into the next cycle, how can you set intentions that are infused with the wisdom of winter? What qualities of self-awareness, connection, or empowerment do you want to weave into your creative and soulful becoming?
4. Seed Planting Ritual: Using your journaling as a starting point, identify a clear and concise intention to bring the wisdom of winter, or the dream, with you while waking. What you can do to bring the wisdom of winter into the action and activity of spring and summer in a way that resonates with you and your lived experience. When you are ready, whisper your intention to a seed (real or imagined), and plant it (physically, or by imagining it being planted in your heart).