RITUAL TEXT

for those who would like to read the meditations, find your guide below…

STEP 1

April 11 / New Moon

This meditation is best undertaken at nighttime on the New Moon, though a day or two in either direction is fine. Find a quiet place where you will be comfortable reading and meditation for about 10 minutes (or longer, if you wish). Take a few deep breaths to ground yourself. Let’s begin.

🌑

Today is a New Moon. The Moon is between our Earth and the sun, making it invisible to us, the near side cloaked in shadow. The night sky is dark. The New Moon is a time when many witches contemplate the Shadow.

What is the Shadow? The darkness, however you define it. Death. Pain and anxiety. Fear and loneliness. Our own flaws and dark impulses. We have spent the past year immersed in the Shadow: The virus, mass protest because of mass injustice, set against the backdrop of a deepening climate crisis, and the nagging knowledge that the ecological respite of our quiet year ebbs each day as we get back to whatever it was we called ‘normal’ before. This is a heavy time.

Years ago, in an era different from ours but alike in so many ways, people too felt the weight of their time: A senseless, endless war, the upheaval of sweeping social movements, a burgeoning recognition that humans had swung wildly out of balance with their surroundings. They shared a sense that ‘normal’ was not sustainable. ‘Normal’ was dead.

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Hope is as fragile as a bird’s egg. But the dark night is the best in which to view the stars. 

The New Moon is a new beginning. The beginning of a cycle. It is a time when we set intentions for ourselves, when we ask the Moon to be our guiding light and remind us of a promise we make ourselves. A promise we make today that will grow as the Moon waxes in the sky.

Hold your hands before you like a nest and imagine the fragile earth nestled in your palms. Cradle the world in your hands like an egg, precious and full of growing life. Feel its weight. The weight of your responsibility. You have the power to both uphold and destroy. You can nurture and crush.

As you meditate today, imagine what you could do this month to bring this world a bit more into balance. There are so many options. Eating less meat or recalibrating your thermostat. Planting a garden of flowers for butterflies or vegetables for your family. If this is new for you, perhaps it could be as simple as setting aside time to learn about the environment where you live. Let your mind settle on one thing, no matter how big or how small. 

Make a promise today to the living earth, that over the next few weeks you will make this action become a part of your life. You will honor it and give it space to grow as the moon waxes full.

What do you promise today to the living earth?

🌑

Meditate upon this question for as long as you feel called.

STEP 2

April 20 / First Quarter

This reflection is best undertaken within sight of the moon on the First Quarter Moon, though a day or two in either direction, and any location, is fine. On a clear night, the First Quarter Moon should be visible in the Western sky after sunset until it sets at midnight. 

Settle into a comfortable place where you will be undisturbed while you read and meditate. Ground yourself and take notice of how your body feels in space today.

🌓

Today is the First Quarter Moon. A moment of balance as the moon waxes, hung between crescent and sphere. A moment to check on our intentions, to turn them over like a stone. Are you nurturing the promise you made on the New Moon? Are you tending to the plowed fields and looking for shoots? 

Fifty-one years ago on this day, activists and lawmakers from across the political spectrum in the United States were preparing to bring a grand set of intentions to fruition. For years they had been aware of the environmental chaos that had been unleashed across the land. The filthy air created by leaded gasoline. The toxic waste dumped by feckless corporations. A river so choked with chemicals that it burst into flame. The eggshells of great birds were so brittle that mothers would crush them in the nest. The unyielding destruction of post-war capitalism was writ large across the land.

In response to this chaos, these people had planned a great gathering, now just a few days away. What would be the outcome of the efforts of these people, banding together? They couldn’t know. They prepared to act in the very face of despair. They had seen the smog blot out their skylines. They had read Silent Spring. Some of them knew the bottomless ache of seeing their ancestors’ lands and bodies plundered, the ecology of their own cultures pushed to the brink of extinction.

Intentions don’t become reality by magic. There is no spell that bends the properties of physics or time. The magic is in ourselves. It is in the power of human beings to use symbols and visions to connect and inspire. In our ability to change. Fifty-one years ago these people laid their plans. They checked the details. They poured their spirits into what they believed and they sought to tip the scales back into balance.

On the New Moon you made a promise.

Are you coming into balance?

What are the resources you need in order to pursue your goal?

🌓 

Meditate upon this question for as long as you feel called.

STEP 3

April 22 / Earth Day

Happy Earth Day. Today, find a comfortable, quiet place to reflect. Maybe it could be outside, perhaps in connection with the ground. Wherever you choose will be perfect. Take a few deep breaths, ground yourself, then let’s continue our journey.

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Some ten percent of Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, with radical impacts. By the end of that year, the federal government had created the Environmental Protection Agency. Though Walter Cronkite reported that Earth Day participants were “predominantly young, predominantly white, predominantly anti-Nixon,” lawmakers soon passed bipartisan, landmark legislation like the Occupational Health and Safety Act, Clean Air and Water acts, and the Endangered Species Act. None of them are perfect, but these laws shape our lives and our land every day. 

Conservation as a bipartisan affair goes back even further, to Teddy Roosevelt, to the foundation of the National Parks, but its history is complicated. The vast American networks of protected lands, one of the crown jewels of modernity, came about in large part to protect hunting rights. Land was preserved as sacred, but the great herds of buffalo and packs of wolves are gone, deliberately eliminated. Native peoples were removed from land that had given them life and held the bones of their dead for thousands of years, since ice encased our planet like a crystal ball. 

There aren’t many easy answers out there, but five years ago today, the Paris Climate Agreement was signed. One hundred and ninety four states, representing billions of the Earth’s people, agreed that we must take collective action. That we are stronger together. 

We have seen what happens when we try to put one country or one people first. When we ignore our duty to one another. When we value profit over people, over animals, over ecological systems and the delicate web of life. 

This Earth Day, feel into the ecology of your life, the web that surrounds and suspends you. The humans, animals, plants, and protozoa living in a delicate balance, or not, with the physical, mineral Earth. Feel into the possibility of your intention coming into being alongside the intention of so many others. Feel into what could happen when you keep your promise to the earth. And when I do. And when she does. And when we all do.

Who will help you in this journey toward a living earth in balance? And who can you help? 

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Meditate upon these questions for as long as you feel called.

STEP 4

April 26 / Full Moon

This reflection is best undertaken under the light of the Full Moon, though a day or two in either direction, and any location, is fine. 

Settle into a comfortable place where you will be undisturbed while you read and meditate. Ground yourself and take notice of how your body feels in space today.

🌕

The Full Moon is a reminder of promises made full. 

A few days ago, we celebrated Earth Day together. We marveled at the achievements of the nascent Environmental Movement, the beginning of a reckoning long-overdue and that remains far from finished. It was regular people who organized teach-ins that day and rode their bikes to statehouses demanding action. People like you and me who signed petitions and called their legislators. Millions of people motivated by common cause, who in living memory had seen a tsunami of change in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. They knew our great capacity for change.

Like our predecessors, we have seen incredible movements with our own eyes. We don’t have to look back years, but weeks and months. The greatest challenges of our time are an ecology of movements, a constellation of good fights, interdependent and interwoven. We live in a time of abundance, when more and more people are recognizing that our work together lies at the intersection.

Take some time now to reflect on the intention you set for yourself on the New Moon. The promise you made to the living earth.

Have you achieved what you set out to? Maybe you are only started down the path? What did you need in order to arrive here or to keep going forward? Who were the people who stood by your side? Who do you need yet to find?

Perhaps this Full Moon may be a reminder of history repeating itself. A reminder that we too can revel in the abundance and light - the magic - that occurs when we work together with shared intention. 

🌕

Meditate upon the abundance of the Full Moon for as long as you feel called.

STEP 5

May 1 / Beltane

Today is May 1, the day of Beltane. A traditional Pagan festival at the midpoint between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, Beltane is a celebration of the fertile, living earth bursting forth into life. It is a fire festival, signifying the transformation of the land and the energy of creation. In modern days it is celebrated both by spiritual Pagans and devotees of Celtic culture, often with an indulgence in the pleasures of the body and the earth: wine, sex, dancing, flowers, and fresh air. 

Today, let’s celebrate the journey you’ve been on and the space you’ve created over the last few weeks. You carried the stillness of the New Moon through the month so that you might contemplate where we have been and where we are going. You tracked the energy of a movement building over time and reflected on how the past connects to the present.

The world around you is bursting into spring. Orange blossoms drip with perfume in the twilight hours. Warm breezes rustle the soft grass, winter rain made manifest in a living carpet upon the earth. Flowers bloom soft pink and white, purple and gold, a riot of color exploding in the light of the warming sun.

Our human world too is bursting like spring. This time of renewed abundance is filled with promise, or perhaps a subtle menace as the culture clamors for normalcy. But normal is dead. Something new is taking hold, the rhizomes and the roots repurposing the nutrients of what was, the sprouts pushing toward the light, new life emerging from the grave of a year, what is this living thing you behold in front of you, rising from the ground toward the sun? An oak? A palm tree? Dappled mushrooms? A great blooming cactus? Wildflowers? Flowers, as far as the eye can see.

You can always return to the earth. To the things you noticed during the quiet year. The leaves on a tree. The hiking trail. The sunset light in your windows. You can always return to the earth which is your constant companion. Return to the quiet joy of the earth springing back to life.

Ritual by Monica Miklas