Keep Migrating with the Moon, Avoid the Settler’s Way
by Dana Gerhardt

I’ve heard the swallows of San Juan Capistrano no longer return to the mission on the first day of spring.  Urban development around the mission has reduced the insect population they feed on.  The swallows have gone elsewhere; tourists flock into the town instead.  It’s a little funny, a little sad, that one of the most celebrated rites of spring has lost its actual connection to wild nature.  I take this as a cautionary tale for moon work as well, especially in cyberspace, where the moon doesn’t literally shine. 

At MoonCircles we honor the missing moon as the Capistrano Mission honors its swallows.  We hope we inspire a good celebration each month.  And we hope that, just as the Capistrano tourists may be inspired to head out for the wild lands and locate real swallows after the party, our circle will likewise be moved to keep noticing the unfolding, living textures of each moon phase.*This experiential connection is the most important part of moon work and the hardest aspect to share.  Whatever I intend for a cycle, the fulfilled experience of it always includes surprise.  It is this surprise that makes me feel most connected to the moon and her abiding lessons of change.

In my early thirties I made a horrifying discovery.  I was cleaning out a box of old papers, things I’d written in my twenties.  I read through the pages, occasionally surprised at their brilliance, often embarrassed at the lack of it.  I stopped at one page in particular, written in a bright, optimistic hand, titled “GOALS!”  Seeing what an earlier version of me had aspired to, I was stunned.  That ten-year-old list was identical to the one I’d written just a day before – and I thought the goals were new ones!  It seems I was ending my first decade of adulthood not too far from where I started it. 

That an otherwise intelligent woman could so thoroughly forget, or resist, her desires had a profound impact on me.  It’s part of what eventually brought me to the moon.  The moon cycling through the zodiac helps to pattern for us a life of continual discovery and growth.  But, it doesn’t guarantee it.  Why?  One answer might lie in the difference between people and swallows, or more accurately, our differing approaches to using the land. 

Humans are settlers; we like to stick in one place and develop it.  Swallows migrate.  They explore, make do, keep moving, forever on the lookout for what sustains them.  Settlers build up comforts; they consume.  Migrators cast their lot with the land’s cycles and its unforeseen changes.  They remain alert to what the land gives or takes away.  If spring arrives and the insects are gone, the swallows go with them.  But a settler, having developed so many comforts, might not even see that what first attracted in a particular landscape is gone.  Settlers can get restless, but they move to their mind more than the seasons.  They feel most successful when they’ve cancelled them, ensuring good days all year round. 

It’s a remarkable strategy.  But with an unintended consequence:  the progressive loss in connectivity to the changing natural world.  We become captured by our own systems. Our hardiness for the journey, and to be changed by our journeying, diminishes.  What more powerful expression of this than cyberspace itself, where one can arrive in a hundred destinations, without ever going away from one’s starting point.  There is no sun, no moon, but a constant glow.  One touches information only, nothing the senses can make real. 

And so, of all the moon practices I keep, this is the most important:  to keep migrating, avoid settling. To always seek real nourishment from the moon, not simply consume information.  If I forget to set up my circle of crystals or to light my sage, or weave a meditation of relevant imagery, I am still alert to the living texture of moontime.  I lie in wait for that surprising moment, when the full moon comes, when I’ll see a simple, unexpected revelation.  It’s often as subtle as moonlight, and easy to miss if my senses weren’t tuned, but it is new, it feels new, each time.  When the cycle begins again at the next new moon, like a traveler, I wonder again at that mystery of what will become.  Such are the tasty “insects” I like to eat with the moon.