“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” Rilke
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Isak Dinesen
The Pisces new moon of March 17, 2018, is a healing moon, revealing much that needs to be completed and released.This healing and completing new moon closely conjuncts Chiron, the wounded healer, which reveals and heals the wound of separation from Source, from each other, from our wild, whole and holy selves. The New Moon conjunct Chiron exposes your deepest wounds. Chiron is wrapping up his transit through Pisces (February 2011) so it would be beneficial to look for indicators of your healing journey since then. Chiron is an instrument of healing through art, or your compassion in helping others. You have been gathering riches and resources of soul.
Jupiter in Scorpio has sent us to the depths of our collective psyche, into dark realms we might have been avoiding for years and would prefer not to visit! We are helped to have courage to face difficult issues which were hidden or ignored until now. Face the truth. Free yourself from fear and other binding emotions and beliefs holding you captive. You are capable of navigating this darkness with more skill and strength than ever.
Our collective attention is focused on the current patriarchal rot of corrupt and cruel power. But we are not only witnesses. We are visionaries and agents of transformation, bringing the healing power of right action, balance, using power to protect, preserve, life.
Slow down. Reflect. Have compassion for yourself and others. There is the potential for great healing now. If you are feeling the pain of an old, old wound, open your heart. Be aware we are all together, in oceanic oneness, swept up in an ongoing process of personal and collective evolution. Challenged mightily to surrender the old story. Let it wash away to make space for the new. Accept and allow.
If you feel you are slogging around in soggy, damp, emotional ground, be aware of the fertile soil for new beginnings. There is every opportunity and many allies for the healing now of very old wounds, or those sufferings perhaps ignored for the last seven years. Allow and accept the tides, the waves of feeling, to wash over and through you. You will soon be spurred on to take action for your success.
This is a good time to break away from a job that does not bring you happiness and success, or relationships that squash your self expression and freedom. Go inward. Trust your instincts. The wounds not yet healed are revealed and brought up for transformation. The challenge is to face them while embracing and celebrating all you have been through. What you have learned. How brave and strong you have become.
“Take stock of what you have achieved. Celebrate the completion of tasks. Be joyful. Ask for guidance. Build community. And make sure you don’t ignore the gifts you’ve been given or refuse help when offered.” (Donna Woodwell, Donna Philosophica)
As events of this new moon unfold, accept this may be a vulnerable and painful time. Nurture yourself. Ask:
1) What small step do I need to take next?
2) What milestone in my life can I celebrate?
3) What difficulties, obstacles, suffering have I managed to surmount, overcome, endure?
4) What gifts and lessons am I grateful for?
5) What seeds can I feel pushing through to be cultivated?
In a paradox of surrender (accept and allow) and taking action, we trust that we are being directed to the truest, most expanded version of ourselves. Focus on your most deeply held ideals, what you want for the long term.
Here is the opening to take a deep dive into the deeper intelligence permeating all life. Perhaps you are learning to breathe underwater.
Surrender your burdens knowing that you are held by the limitless ocean of possibilities. Feel the compassion and acceptance of what is. Forgive yourself. Forgive others. So much is being offered for your awakening and healing.
Chiron has been in the Feminine water sign of Pisces for seven years, facilitating the healing of women. As individuals reveal the secrets of their victimization, the repression of the Feminine for millennia, wholeness – holiness – is restored. The Feminine wounds have been revealed, awakened, heard and seen. They are being healed. And a powerful reconciliation of feminine and masculine energies is powerfully underway.
On Tuesday, the Spring Equinox, light and dark will be balanced. Persephone will rise from the underworld. And Aries begins the new year of the zodiac, bringing the fire of action to our new beginnings. The Sabian symbol for this day: A woman just risen from the sea. A seal is embracing her.
Maybe this is a Selkie (according to Celtic mythology), bringing her back the skin of her power and magic.

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been”

                                                      Rainer Maria Rilke

2018 will be a year of alchemical transformation. It is an 11 universal year in numerology, master number of new beginnings. It is also the vibration of creation and partnerships. As we move into the Aquarian Age, we enter the mystery as a huge shift begins in the world. Dreams during this period of the year, especially between December 25-January 6^th, are particularly powerful and perhaps prescient for the coming year. This is one I am immersed in:

I sit on a black, rocky promontory over the sea watching the great, giant swells of grey green water as they move toward shore. I am learning to read them, feeling my way into the angles of their direction, the height, the textures, the sensed energies as they rise and fall. They almost look like whales, like the backs of whales as they rise just before breaching the surface. The sea is rather calm except for these mighty swells, tides, waves, moving toward land. In the next scene, I sit with others, teaching them how to read the currents as well.

I am hopeful for the rising tide of the returning Feminine energies, the awakening of the dynamic, transformative Feminine archetype. But I am not sure how long it will take for it to reach shore, to take root. There is so urgent a need to restore and regenerate our nation and our living planet. With the power and energies of the Great Mother, Cancer, and the solid structuring of Saturn in Capricorn, perhaps this year we will rebuild after so much destructiveness and demolition. Perhaps a new story will be birthed from the womb of darkness, the heart of mystery.

This super moon in Cancer, the Full Wolf Moon, brings to light just what needs to end, transform or shift in some radical way in the structures, foundations and old stories that keep playing out in our lives. This is true on both personal and collective levels. This Full Wolf Moon throws us into the heart of mystery of our deepest soul purpose with radical shifts. The energies of this Cancer moon and her unconditional love can assist us in stepping past our fears of radical changes. Conjunct to the full moon was Black Moon Lilith, and Eris, two fierce feminine warriors who are fed up with being ignored. So many more women are reclaiming their time, finding their strongest voices, as collectively we are taking responsibility for our feminine power and sovereignty.

Saturn moved into Capricorn at Winter Solstice December 19. At the Galactic Center, the vast black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, we see into holy darkness. The womb of creation. The place where stars are born. And new stories are birthed. What did you seed at Solstice?

The future cannot be controlled but it can be created. It may feel like we are being sucked into a vortex of destructive economic, political and environmental news. But we are birthing a new story. It is important to tell ourselves, repeatedly, that we have the strength to succeed. We are the ancestors of the future.

Saturn is tough but bestows true authority and the power to make change on this planet and in our lives. He means serious business, an initiation into our own authority, responsibility. Like the Hawaiian word for responsibility – kuleana- this is not just about “duty” but the privilege and blessing of being given a sacred task, the blessing of your gifts, your healed wounds, to accomplish it. Now it seems to me Ho’okuleana is even more important: the shared and collective responsibility to heal ourselves and care for our world kin and the planet.

There is great energy to ground our visions, to focus, to build a structure to support us, boundaries to protect us. Saturn is the master of time. We are asked to stay steadfast in serving soul.

Saturn rules time, social structures, communal life, government, financial systems. Via Cathy Pagano [http://www.wisdom-of-astrology.com/public/page/blog?i=2] and Daniel Giamario, some ancient cultures saw Capricorn as a Council of Grandmothers who shared their wisdom for the common good. This is the wisdom of the earth and of the body. The last time Saturn was in Capricorn was 1988-89. What were you doing then? What have you learned?

In a current online course Kaypacha (http://newparadigmastrology.com/kaypacha/) “Getting Stronger with Saturn” he describes how Saturn allows us to claim our sovereignty, own our authority, by insisting we honor the boundaries, borders, structures of time and the real limitations of third dimension time and space even while our visions and dreams may stretch out to the fourth and fifth dimensions.

Capricorn and Saturn are excellent at structuring and stabilizing our visions and goals. And regardless of our experiences with our personal mothers, we can find home within our inner Mother to nurture ourselves and our dearest creative babies.

Saturn is also the planet of synthesis, helping us to put it all together in alignment with our soul’s destiny. Helping us to define ourselves. Time is limited. What has been deconstructed over the last few years is ready to be reconstructed, renewed. Saturn asks us to come into correct alignment with our soul’s purpose, to stretch towards the Goddess as she is reaching for us. He is the Magician, the benevolent taskmaster. This could be a very creative time. After the tumultuous and tortuous year of the American Presidency, the many assaults on the living planet, the revelation of the darkest secrets surfaced, I am most ready for a new story. I welcome the fierce energies of Black Moon Lilith, of Eris, of women around the world taking off their masks, howling at the moon and claiming their feminine power.

From beloved teacher Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes on this Full Wolf Moon:

The howl is the call to

choose one goal.

The most life-giving, the most life sparing.

Not one or the other, both. Both.

Like a true wolf would do.

The howl is the call to

Focus. One thing to shelter, build in beauty,

end, begin, one thing at a time.

The howl is the call to

Collect your tendernesses and strengths. Both.

Not one or the other. Both. Like a true wolf.

 [Art: Nicholas Roerich]

Last week I visited a favorite “soul’s place of resurrection”, hiking the Tennessee Valley trail in Marin County to the beach. Author Sharon Blackie defines such a place as one where a soul is happiest on earth and, at the same time, most in touch with all that is eternal. It was a magical, breathtaking clear sky day where I watched a blue heron stand poised, present, patient at the edge of the blackwater pond spotted with bright green islands of plants. The water broke and rippled as an otter, sleek and shiny, playfully surfaced and dove over and over again in joy. At the beach, strings of brown pelicans streamed across the water along with smaller black seabirds and sharp winged white birds which just skimmed the waves, chittering and chirping. On the way back, a black snake slithered across my path and into the grass. What gifts did I carry home with me? Heron medicine. The example of dignity, determination, grace, balance, standing steady as she waited for just the right opportunity to plunge. The reminder to play, have fun, be curious like otter. And of course Snake. Ancient wisdom, prophecy, death and rebirth, transformation, the weaving path of the wild and sacred Feminine. So many messengers on the path showing “This way, this way.”

At this time in our country, and the world, we are in need of a new planetary mythology as Joseph Campbell advised. This new story asks us to learn to see in the dark, to find our wild medicine. A rich and brilliant source for finding and living the new myth, grounded in the ancient and never-before-seen Wild Feminine, is Sharon Blackie’s poetic and revolutionary book If Women Rose Rooted: The Power of Celtic Women (2016) September Publishing. Click here

A psychologist, storyteller and writer, Blackie has written a mythic, eco-heroine’s journey. Winner of a Nautilus award, it describes a reclaiming of the power of women rooted in the land, their own indigenous wild wisdom, their forgotten stories. And the urgency to do so.

Although Dr. Blackie is Scottish and Irish, much like Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ stories these will resonate with women across many cultures. It is also a call to every woman to reclaim the powerful stories from her own ancestors, and the land to which she belongs, so that she might revision the world. She is singing to the creators of a new myth by telling the rocky truths about her own weaving journey to find her place of belonging. She accurately and painfully names the wasteland we now live in and passionately resurrects the moral and spiritual authority women have always had and must now reclaim if we are to regenerate this planet and our own wild souls.

Before we can change the world we need to change the stories we tell to ourselves, about ourselves, about who we are. The stories we live. My own eye tends to be on the collective dreams that are emerging from women weaving a new myth, a shared dream, and these Celtic stories of “the wise, the powerful, the strong, the brave” do the same.

“If women remember that once upon a time we sang with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted, like trees…well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves but the world.” 

Blackie quotes Okanagan writer Jeanette Armstrong who explains the word for ourselves is actually “ones who are dream and land together”. Before anything else, we are living, dreaming Earth pieces. When we stand in our feminine power, we are reclaiming the power of the Earth speaking.

“If there is to be a change, it will come from us. Right here, where we stand. Women were always the story-givers, the memory keepers, the dreamers. Listen now to the land’s long dreaming. Do you see what it is dreaming? It’s dreaming you.” (Blackie)

She is particularly addressing older women. To become Elder, as Blackie describes,  is to become strong- strong as the old white bones of the earth, strong enough to endure and persevere. To become Elder is to hold the power, stay the course. Above all to become Elder is “to become the the wise woman: the one who knows the secrets and speaks the languages of the land, who speaks with the moral authority of the Otherworld, who weaves the dreaming of the world.”

So many of our stories, our journeys are like Sharon Blackie’s: losing and rediscovering our feminine powers, then finding ways to use them in service to what we care about most. We bring a different kind of power: Relational. Collaborative. Connecting. Embodied. Magical. Including our intuition, our dreams, navigating by synchronicity. This unique form and expression of power is the deep feminine. It has to do with womb power, creativity, birth giving, connecting to and being devoted to the Earth, the cycle of seasons, spiritual guidance from the Otherworld. As Marion Woodman said of the crone, contradicting the cultural myth of an older woman’s invisibility: “She is not withdrawn. She is alarmingly present. Like a tuning fork her truth shatters hypocrisy. Others in her presence are released into what’s true in themselves…or flee.”

How do we attune to the new myth? It is very difficult being between stories, carrying a piece of “what is to come.”  Because we are not only Earth of course but cosmos. We belong to the stars. What might be coming? We are living through a time of extreme contrast, when the dying and death dealing old story is for a moment all around us. But we are dreaming our way to a new story. Drawing a map that begins in our hearts, and takes us down to the bones of a new foundation.

“The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories. If we go for the deeper and the darker, the less known, we will touch the bones.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The map of the psyche and the map of the world are drawn from the same story: The deeply rooted myth of a separate, independent, and autonomous self. The 5,000 year old story we live by is a story of fragmentation, estrangement, alienation from each other, from Nature and from the vast mystery and beauty of our own wild souls. It is a patriarchal story, too narrow, sterile, shallow for any of us to thrive. When we welcome the wild and sacred Feminine archetype into consciousness, and include women's stories, we can live a new story returning us to wholeness, healing, holiness.

The wild and sacred Feminine speaks in the language of new science, sings the songs of indigenous wisdom. Reclaiming her restores us to an ecology of self, where we know ourselves to be holograms of the divine Universe. She reunites the poet and the physicist, the priestess and the physician, the shaman and the scientist, by connecting us once again to all aspects of our being, transforming the very definition of what it means to be human. Perhaps, in living this new story, we also transform God.

Through the wild Feminine we transcend the duality of the Masculine Doing, or Feminine Being to embrace the third, completing element of Becoming. This is the way of the Crone. The cornerstone of feminine psychology is not Eros but creativity and transformation. Creatio continua, open and endlessly changing, transforming, on a spiral path of becoming. More a series of processes and patterns than static structures, we exist in states of dynamic equilibrium, growing in richness and complexity. Our inner wild Nature is as vast and mysterious as the galaxies from which we come, the sea tides which move us, the stars of which we are made.

Wild mind is an inclusive, contextual, relational, integrated intelligence which sees the Both/And realm of possibilities in long range vision, seven generations out. Grandmother Mind* (Zulu healer credo Mutwa) has a tolerance for ambiguity, holding multiple truths simultaneously. Intuition, imagination, creativity and play are her gifts and genius. We are living in a singular moment. This moment of chaos and conflict, this time of warfare against women and the environment, is the dying gasp of the old delusional and destructive story. These are the birth pangs, the struggle to be born of the new story, the new order, a pattern which connects.

To midwife this birth, we must address the deep fears of feminine power we all house. Rooted in the myth of the superiority and necessity of a separate self, this fear defends and protects that self even to the death of everything around it for fear of being annihilated. But women know in the depth of their wild souls, the marrow in their bones, that we are all connected, both Self-and-Other, interdependent with all beings. We also know that transformation does not occur in a linear fashion, step-by-step ladder, stage by stage schedule, or one area of life at a time. Lasting change, true transformation, arises out of chaos. Long associated with women, danger, and the Feminine, chaos appears to be random but is at its deepest levels patterned, connected, purposive.

Women's greatest gifts lie in their visionary power and multidimensional capacity to create. We must remythologize from the inside out. How do we find the images and symbols for the arising wild Feminine story? Dreams are one of the most powerful sources. Appearing as Snake, or Grandmother Spider Woman, or in the voices of Earth herself, or the Goddess. We carry the vision of the emerging possible.

Now, there is a quickening of the depths. The emerging feminine principle is not just the missing element of a symmetry, but the transformative catalyst for the entire notion of what it means to be human. What do we really wish for? What do we value? What do we love? These are the most powerful self-organizing and manifesting powers we have. And we each have these capacities. This is how God comes to know Herself in us.

With our evolutionary wild selves, we bring an integral leadership that reclaims Feminine power and wild wisdom. From the Old French reclamer – we recall someone from an erring state to a proper state. We are being pulled into the future.

by Marilyn Steele, PhD.

Photography and Sculptures by Debra Bernier