Dreamers Moon
The Crescent Moon is quiet, like a late winter blanket of snow that falls softly overnight while you’ve been sleeping. You awake to a world of white, icicle fantasy that shimmers with a special kind of magic, that childlike wonder that beckons us into our dreams. Below ground, the plants have already begun to stir with the increase of light, but they do not yet dare to emerge, instead they lay under the pearl comforter of snow, and dream.
The Crescent Moon is a Dreamers Moon, a moon full of ideas that have germinated their hard shells but are not ready to sprout. Thin white roots form tributaries through the soil, drinking in water, drinking in life, and dreaming of sun on fresh, green leaves.
The Crescent Moon is but a sliver in the sky, cut out like the thin curve of a fingernail.
They are the first hint of light that follows a moonless night and with it, we are renewed. A new cycle has begun, and we too feel reborn, us children of the Moon. Crescent Moon people are born tasting hope; born into a moment of expanding possibility. They are not afraid to ask, ‘what if?’
For the Crescent Moon the future is fluid. The future is wet clay to be molded and shaped by hands that move with the curiosity of a child. Crescent Moon people are not afraid to return their creations back to amorphous blobs and begin again. There is no rigidity, only playful exploration.
Those born under a crescent moon are people who know the power of Dream.
Once upon a time, Dreamers were respected. They would sit on high councils, govern leaders and imagine what others could not. They knew how to resurrect themselves each morning from their otherworldly journeys and untangle the omens from the bramble.
To be a Dreamer is to be more than just a colorful imagination; to be a Dreamer you must participate with the Dream. To dream deeply is also to be dreamt, and a Dreamer knows how to keep the mind l o o s e.
A Crescent Moon is dreaming itself into being.
The Crescent Moon is a frost covered forest where there stands a grove of alabaster women with thin, peeling skin. Stark white bark against gashes of charcoal, she is Birch, the one the Celts called the Lady of the Woods. Beneath her papery exterior is the deep mahogany bark that smells of hope and wintergreen. Birch is a keeper of dreams and a beacon of renewal.
Like the Crescent, Birch is the perpetual maiden. Birches are short lived trees, 100 years of life is elderly, and more often their lives are shorter. They are fertile beings, stumps will eagerly sprout new shoots from the flat cut tops, ever moving towards growth. They say Birch was the first to seed the ground after the glaciers receded, that it was Birch gum that held together the Stone Age tools of our ancestors, and Birch sap they fermented into ritual drink.
Brooms made from Birch twigs are bound together to purify homes and gardens, inviting in the fertile new beginnings of Beith or Beth as the Druids named her. Still today, Birch brooms are used in shrines and temples, and the bark is placed on smoldering coals in saunas and sweat lodges to cleanse and heal the body from the inside out.
How many cradles were carved from her bark to hold the babes born of love, their placentas buried under trees of Birch as an offering to Freyja?
How many dreams have been scrawled on the flesh of her paper skin, and burned as a prayer under a silver crescent?
As the moon grows, a story is told. Where we enter this story shapes our lives and creates the lens from which we come to know the world. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing on the archetype of each of the eight phases and the medicine that they offer.
Dreamers Moon
Song Moon
Unfurling Moon
Visionary Moon
Storytelling Moon
Weaving Moon
Bone Moon