Greetings Reader,
There's a particular kind of tired that doesn't come from doing too much. It's the tired of a season, or a chapter, that's quietly asking to be finished and if you've felt it this week, a heaviness you can't quite name, a pull toward your own bed and your own silence, I don't think anything's wrong with you. I think you're in rhythm with the sky.
We're in the last thin sliver of the old moon right now, the few days before it disappears altogether and a new one begins. The old traditions called this the balsamic moon, after balsam, the same word that gives us balm. It's the most healing stretch of the whole cycle, and it asks almost nothing of you except that you let something end.
Here's what I keep coming back to.
A plant in autumn doesn't experience its dying-back as a failure. It pours everything that mattered, the whole intelligence of its season, down into one small seed, and then it lets the rest fall away. And that seed, to become anything at all, needs the dark, a cold, fallow, do-nothing stretch before it will ever grow. The rest isn't laziness.
It's the one condition without which nothing new ever arrives. So if all you can manage right now is to go quiet and be gentle with yourself, you are not behind. You're doing the exact thing the seed does.
The other image that won't leave me is resin. Frankincense and myrrh, the most precious, most fragrant things we've ever burned in temples and carried to sacred births are nothing more than the tears a tree weeps when its bark is cut.
The tree makes its most sacred medicine out of the very place it was wounded.
So when something old rises up to be released in these last dark days an old hurt, a story about yourself you've outgrown, a tired way of carrying money or worth, you're not being asked to erase it or pretend it never happened. You're being asked to let it finish becoming balm. The wound was never the problem. It was always on its way to becoming the medicine.
Then tomorrow night, the new moon. The seed goes into the ground. And here's the quiet, important part: the soil of a new cycle is made of the stories you choose to plant in it. So before the doing starts again, I want to invite you to feel into just one thing, not plan it, not strategize it, just feel for it the way you'd feel for warmth in a cold room.
What do you actually want to grow this time? What would you love to be holding in your hands by the next full moon, not because you should, but because some quiet part of you has wanted it for a while?
You don't have to have the answer tonight. You only have to put down what's finished, and let the dark do what the dark does.
With you in the quiet,
Barbara
P.S. — If it helps these next couple of nights, there's an old practice I love: saying, even once and even under your breath, "I surrender to the Divine." Sometimes that single sentence is what turns letting go from a nice idea into something you can actually feel.
