The Altar of the Heart ~ July 20th New Moon
The Lunar Lowdown – a few notes
While not a transcript of our current video by any means,
I’ve included the notes below if you’d prefer to read or for referencing the information later!
Actual Time of Celestial Event: Monday July 20th, 2020 @ 11:33 am MDT
Sun’s position: 3 degrees Cancer (The Crab)
Moon’s position: 3 degrees Cancer (The Crab)
Bonus planets: Saturn @ 3d Capricorn / Pluto 29d Sagittarius / Jupiter 27d Sagattarius
For this New Moon in Cancer, I found myself visionarily in a boat upon a wide and slow river. We are in deep forest. I sense wise and indigenous people who live here ~ they are standing upon the lefthand shore. We come to anchor where they are, I disembark and I follow them silently through the woods where I am given over to a grandmother – who then leads me into inside something like a tepee but not necessarily a tepee and it is a circle of grandmothers and it is dark.
there is a small but potent fire in the center and there are shadows all around us.
I become distinctly aware, It is New Moon, the dark of the Moon… here, with the grandmothers within this inner sanctuary, the shadows within my own self rise up; my weaknesses and inner darkness become clear…
This moon, we see our failings and our shortcomings.
In essence we perceive that which is human, that which is imperfect within ourselves. This works on us two fold:
1. we are forced to recognize our own imperfections and thus gain compassion for other people who in other times we might have judged harshly. (who we might prefer to judge harshly) We can look at others from our knowledge that we are not perfect either; we can seek to cease expecting perfection from others.
Seeing how vulnerable we are to the critical gaze of others, we soften our critical gaze upon them.
2. The second benefit of seeing our failings and shortcomings is that we are appropriately humble; we listen more than we speak and when we do speak we come from what we know. We humbly look inward and we practice the next layer of how to not be hard on ourselves in the way that is paralyzing and self-defeating instead finding healthy self assessment to see where we can do better.
Cancer is the constellation of the vessel of who we are, the rib cage, the container, the sanctuary. How does that land in you, as a real human being now? What are you carrying in there? What are you holding onto? what is inside your holiest of holies? What sits upon the altar of the divine that we all carry inside of our hearts?
This is a time to examine the soil in which our life grows – not around us but within.
Returning to the grandmothers, I saw in the center of our circle a deep dark cauldron that reaches all the way down into the void… this cauldron speaks to the connection to the eternal void out of which all things come… including you… including me…
Here in Cancer we are connected to that initial Aries energy at a crucial turning point; turning a corner from Aries. This ‘opening square’ in astrology is called a “crisis in activity” ~ at this tension point, the grandmothers show me that it is the time to connect back into this source place from which I arrived, you arrived and our ancestors arrived. It is the time to reconnect to our vast potential.
Perhaps in a word, stillness. We connect to this empty fullness (this luminous emptiness) as the umbilical cord that fed us before our physical birth, the umbilical cord that can access our origins. We commune to refresh our connection to what is meant to be upon the altar of our hearts, according to our own soul’s intentions while stepping out past the summer solstice into the upcoming first harvest.
Be still, be quiet, empty your self and refresh…
aho amen