Cat Birds and the Corn Moon 🐦‍⬛🌽🌕

Each full moon I take my walking stick broom on a walk. It’s become a ritual that I anticipate and always try to make time for, no matter how busy or tired I may be. When I return home, I always walk back into the house feeling at peace, reflective, and connected. Each monthly walk leaves me contemplating messages from the moon, my broom, and the divine all around me.

I am so blessed to live in a place where I leave my front door, and I am in the woods. I walk down the gravel road into fields surrounded by forested hills. The trees along the skyline feel like guardians.

This Corn Moon, the crickets other insects were so loud and lovely. At sunset a Gray Catbird was calling in the bushes…. I thought about how he was migrating south to Texas or perhaps even Mexico. This got me thinking about cycles. The return and departure of my beloved birds, and the bats. The changes in the weather that are coming. Already the mornings are a bit cooler. Soon the evenings will be chilly and it becomes more and more likely that the Full Moon will be obscured by clouds as the Fall and Winter months arrive.

Gray Catbird Photo- Cornell Lab of Ornithology

It is easy, in our modern world, to become disconnected from cycles and nature. Unless you are outdoors a lot or just very observant, the changing of the lengthening light and darkness, the angle of the sun… these may not be that noticeable. The changes in temperature are... But we are insulated from these queues as well, by being indoors and by climate controlled dwellings.

Capitalism and marketing push us towards recognizing and anticipating cycles by commercialized Holidays. But even these are not synced with Nature, as they have us building up and buying for Halloween in July and Christmas in August. I want to be more connected to seasonal cycles and this means more time outdoors, more time just noticing. The differences in the sounds and smells, the way the light angles through the trees...

I purchased a beautiful artistic rendering of the Wheel of the Year and mounted it on a lazy Susan and put it in my bedroom. As each Sabbat arrives I turn the Wheel and try to slow down to appreciate the phase that just passed and the next phase. As Mabon approaches I am thinking about what I have planted these last months and what I am harvesting now until Samhain. So much has changed….

As I headed home on my walk, I also thought about how small we are. Physically that is. Any time I am enjoying the stars and the moon I wind up thinking about Space and Scale. To the moon we aren’t even visible. Just little teeeny tiny dots on another dot. Like cells inside a larger organism. And I wondered to my self, if I am but a cell in the larger organism of the earth, what function do I have in this body? Am I a benefitting cell, helping to earth to exist in good health and happiness?

These are the musings brought to me from the moon, my broom, and this beautiful place I live. I hope this next Moon Cycle brings you the harvest you’ve worked so hard to generate. ❤️