Cosmic Moon
Turtle
Endure – Transcend – Presence
How can I expand my joy & love?
The Cosmic moon is the thirteenth of 13 in a 365-day solar cycle that begins July 26 with the rise of Sirius at dawn. In the first, Magnetic moon we discovered our purpose for the entirety of this 13 moon year. In the second, Lunar moon we identified the challenge within our purpose, the obstacle we have to integrate or overcome to reach our divine intent. In the third, Electric moon, we felt the presence of the god force fill the distance and discord between our purpose and challenge. In the fourth Self-Existing moon, we were shown specifically what form our service would take, the foundation for the temple this year represents. In the fifth, Overtone moon we were given the empowerment to move our vision upward, and in the sixth, Rhythmic moon, we developed a cadence to pace ourselves in our deep work of this year. In the seventh, Resonant moon we attuned ourselves to the divine world for a moment of inspiration and regeneration. In the eighth, Galactic moon, we integrated the Resonant channel we received with everything we had initiated in the first six moons of the year, creating harmony within and without.
After this intense preparatory work, we were ready in the ninth Solar moon to pulse our intention for this year’s manifestation of our purpose. The tenth Planetary moon was an instant response from the divine forces – our prayers answered and wishes granted in an identifiable way within our earth reality. The eleventh Spectral moon is a sort of reversal, when all that is manifested at the peak of the wave is allowed by the forces of nature to fall away into dissolution. The wave breaks. In the twelfth Crystal moon, we readjust ourselves to sea level, and share the stories with each other of the ride we just took through the wave’s heights and splashy finish. In the final Cosmic moon, there is a quieting of all the surface froth at the wave’s completion, a calming ease after so much accomplishment, as well as a sense of the swell below sea level of the next wave to come.
The Cosmic moon holds a key teaching of the Natural Time calendar. It represents the number 13, a sacred celebration of presence, of being completely in the now of life experience. In the 13 Moon calendar, we ride a long slow wave from sea level to its highest skyward peak. We feel it break and then from its frothy dissolution quell once more, before it seems to submerge completely and the ocean’s surface is only still. This quiet calm somehow holds a recent memory within it of the wave we just rode. It also has a resonance of the next wave to come, a sub-surface swell rising from the ocean’s depths. The Cosmic moon, the 13th tone of our wavespell, is held by this image. We are in the world between wave heights, in relative stillness or even stoppage, and yet we feel the past and future movements radiating out from this present moment.
We live culturally without a reverence for 13. It’s cut out of our Gregorian calendar so that the twelve-month count is more geometric than oceanic – resembling a clock or the pie wedges of a circle. We are trained to fear 13 as unlucky, or at least shadowy, but the historical truth of indigenous cultures is that 13 moons make a year. It’s modernization – colonization and industrialization – that has eradicated reverence for 13. A choice had to be made to subvert the pagan worship of the moon cycles in the sky – the lunar phases from new to full and new again – as well as in the women whose menstrual cycles aligned with the cosmos. We used to count the moons of a year by a woman’s blood flow – but then this was rewritten as crass, carnal, immoral, and in the same window the moons became months and the 13th moon was cut into pieces and patched onto the ends of the other twelve.
Without the celebration of 13, our culture has also abandoned the stillness between pushes of growth and accomplishment. We move metaphorically from the wave’s final foment after the crash to the next one’s initiation. We are not allowed the calm after the surges, the space between orchestral climaxes, so that life becomes one stream of churned energy and little rest. It’s strange to imagine that missing one part in a whole of 13 could be so impacting, but if we liken it to the glassiness between wave swells, and then take it away – we can see the storm-riddled sea and the havoc of constant heights and breakaway descents, with no space to recoup from the stress. Sounds too much like modern life: high speed and all-access, with worldwide summits and crashes and calamity, clamor.
To reclaim the 13th moon is an act of power, and it’s perfect that the moon in question is called Cosmic. When we have this presence in our lives, we are one with the cosmos, with each other on earth as well as the deities and the star clusters well above it. We are limitless, and we are interconnected. We are part of one organism, one love. Over 13 moons we have been alternately Lunar, noticing the moon phases of shadow and light within ourselves; Galactic, when we integrate all the parts of the galaxy and the individualized stars wash into a spray of mother’s milk in the night sky; Solar, a pulsing sun ray ourselves and in close communication with the central source of light and life, the creative epicenter of our universe; and finally Planetary, bringing the sunbeam to our earth terrain and digging ourselves into our destiny here. In each of these astronomical references we have expanded and contracted into the open space of our universe. Now we are at the ultimate arrival of all-inclusion. We are as wide as the whole karmic history of this planet and the trillion other jewels that decorate the Dreamtime darkness. Sounds Cosmic, no?
Viscerally, the Cosmic moon feels ‘out there’, ‘spacey,’ and off the charts. We can mix the metaphor of the sea surface flat-lined between waves with one of ourselves day-tripping to the distant stars of the outer universe with our astral bodies. The ocean is matter, the access to celestial constellations almost ether. We can know the Cosmic moon on both levels. In our everyday movements, we will feel slowness, a lull, and the reflection backwards over this long year of distinct growth – as well as anticipation of another cycle of inspiration, challenge and change. In our meditations, our inner journeying and outer dreaming, we will feel that there is only interconnection between ourselves and the otherness of all life.
It’s easy to let this Cosmic communion in when our bodies are slowed to peace and ease. If we try in our physiology to skip the 13th moon – still stuck in our current cultural paradigm of constant agitation, if we don’t take rest, relaxation and let our ambitions stall, we will be unsettled by the wide opening of our minds and hearts. We have nowhere to get right now except into the heart of the sacred power of 13. We can leave our culture behind in this time and be timeless, unhurried or harried, only arriving in the now over and over like the song we played a thousand times through one junior high summer.
It makes sense that the Cosmic moon is planted in midsummer heat and harvest. We can rest because our needs are accounted for, in the Northern Hemisphere at least with the predominant world population. School’s out, surf’s up, sweet flowers blossom next to ripe fruit. We tend to struggle only with the act of unwinding, undoing the tension of our civilization’s constant climax. And just when we realize we love peace in our lives, the days shorten and the new wave underlying this ease starts to stir. So enjoy the Cosmic moon, the sacrament of stillness and simplicity. Remember the past – what you transcended over twelve earlier moons in order to reveal yourself more authentically in this world. Realize the future’s imminence, the next enduring of growing pain that will only render you even more awake and alive as a soul.
The Cosmic moon is a time to transcend that which was a severe challenge as recently as at the year’s outset. We have learned through a balance of struggle and divine guidance to overcome old obstacles, patterns of tension and resistance to the present moment. We are peaceably in the now – now – for our growth, and the experience is of exaltation, ecstasy, and calm self-love: I faced this change and rose to it. Simultaneously, we feel the off-kilter discomfort of the next arising lesson of self-emergence. This act of endurance is a thread weaving us to the next year on the horizon line, teaching us a new subtle growing pain that is dulled mostly by our immediate understanding of what we have just cycled through in courage. We remember the past as a triumph and that which seems like a trial right now will in the future also be triumphant. This deepest teaching of the Cosmic moon describes what it is to live in presence, year-round, all days into nights: we can accept our existence as a series of challenges to endure and transcend, rising – closing the gap between us and our god – to meet the growth opportunities we’re given.
