Nox Amicus

Last weekend brought us another New Moon. To steal a line from “What’d I Miss?”, from Hamilton: “there is no more status quo / but the sun comes up and the world still spins.”

There aren’t words I can use that will be thoughtful enough, descriptive enough, or delicate enough to include here about everything that’s transpired since I wrote my last New Moon post on May 24th. In fact, that’s been part of the reason that this post is so delayed – I kept writing… but I’d get two pages in before I ever got to the point of this post. So I am deliberately narrowing the focus. I am mindful of all that has happened, all that is happening, and all that is about to happen in the world – this post doesn’t address any of that directly. This is intended to be about my path and how I work with the changing cycles of the moon.

Last month, as I shifted my focus from Chaos to Conflict, I wrote:

“Conflict, and the tension that is part of it, is what propels us forward. It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited or aggressive, but it has to be genuine and asserted. There is nothing wrong with the initiation of conflict if it comes organically and is part of an over-arching process. If it moves the game forward and is mindfully woven with threads of compassion, then it is a natural, and essential, part of this thing called life.”

Again, I wrote that on May 24th.

Personally, I ran headlong into that sense of Conflict with my brother’s passing – my grief expressed itself as anger toward a variety of targets. I kept meditating on the concept that Conflict and tension were necessary regardless of how uncomfortable they were, but there has been a lot of it.

In addition to being a New Moon, last weekend brought the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, our longest day of the year. This is where this month’s focus comes in – but in a reversal of sorts. For this cycle, the song gave me the theme:

Give me the lights, precious lights

Give me lights

Give me my hope, give me my energy

You can turn the wrong into right

Precious lights

illuminate me, carry me away

~ “Lights” by Styx from the album Cornerstone

Light can be so many different things – it can be a candle or a flashlight, it can be solar, chemical or bioluminescent, it can be harsh or it can be calming. Light is also nothing without the relief brought by shadow. This afternoon I was talking with a trusted soul about how difficult it’s been to write this – when I remembered my brother talking about Astronomical Spectroscopy – how we can study the physical manifestation of celestial objects by the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum they radiate.

This reminded me that it can never be just one thing. You can’t have purple without blue and red. You can’t have orange without red and yellow. You can’t have full and brilliant sunlight without every color that makes up the rainbow – plus so many more that we can’t even see with our human eyes. And while we’re on the subject of rainbows this month: happiness and peace to all my LGBTQIAPK friends!!

Shining a light on our troubles is all well and good – but I think it’s important to be mindful of the properties of the Light we’re shining. Not all Lights are reflected in the same way, or seen similarly through different lenses. As we move through this cycle, it remains my goal to try to see as many shades as I can – to appreciate both the joys and frustrations through more than just my own lens. But I also want to echo that chorus – that Lights might give us hope and give us energy, transform us and our circumstance, and help to illuminate all of us.