March Greetings!

It's hard to believe that the spring equinox is only seven days away! As we entered this month, I became attuned to how March is a fascinating in-between time for me, especially living in Maine. It's a time when I can feel the excited rumblings of growth, of rebirth under the earths surface, and at the same time experience the personal sadness of the snow that has melted (I just uncovered the last patch of icy snow when I was raking the other day). The winter months hold me so deeply in the climate I live in. The deeper I’ve allowed myself to be held in the dark and in the snow, the more excitement I have for the sun and heat. This March time is an interesting dance of opposites.

February Greetings!

I headed down to NYC last weekend to meet up with Jason after his work week. A couple of years ago I would have wrote that I headed home, but so much has shifted around my sense of home. On the flight down something clicked inside me. I suddenly had access to a full body awareness that I am my home, that wherever I am is home. I know it might sound elementary. I’ve talked about the concept for years now, and intellectually I knew it to be true. Something about the alchemy of that moment in time made it real for me. I finally owned and believed it.

Happy 2024! I'm filled with immense gratitude for you and to be with you on this life's journey! I hope that this new year is meeting you gracefully and with love.

The new calendar year was ushered in by much fog and rain in my neck of the woods. It felt like one long, moody expanse of days leading to New Year's Eve. An interesting end to an intense year. I spent time gazing out into the woods last week. The forest embodied a potent sense of outward stillness. Such a juxtaposition to the severe wind storm that ravaged the trees a few weeks prior. I wondered what conversations and communications were being had between all the trees, plants, and animal life out there. Some sleeping, some naked of leaves, some decomposing, and some seeds incubating in the earth. Instead of journeying to their spirits, I decided to just be among them, letting the wonder and awe of their stillness be the medicine.

December Greetings! I hope this new month is treating you gently!

This time of year can often feel bittersweet for me. Anticipation of all that I see on the horizon in the new year gets coupled with a personal review what has been, and creates an internal environment filled with emotional energy in motion. This time evokes and illuminates different parts of myself and patterns that might not typically come to the surface. I'm finding it a potent time as I become more and more conscious in my life and am making peace with a lot of my shadows.

I hope that November is treating you gently as we find ourselves in such activated and turbulent times. I continue to be humbled as I witness and internally process the war, murder, abuse of power and greed that are erupting locally and globally. At times, this witnessing has challenged my sense of faith, trust, and hope. These times have necessitated that I dwell in and act out of new and unpracticed places within me. Places of unwavering compassion and witnessing without judgement. These times have required me to transform my typical reflexes that are well-practiced and have their roots in old and antiquated patterns.

Happy Autumn ~ I hope that this new season has met you exactly where you needed it to!

I always feel moved and energized by this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere. The softening light, cool evenings, and shifting landscape create a renewed sense of magic and mystery. This time deepens the connection to my ancestors as I watch the leaves begin to change color. They prepare to release from the branches that grew them and drift to the ground to support the next generation, offering cover for the long winter to the flower beds that bloom in spring and shine through the summer.

I entered into September with a tender heart. With last month bookended by two full moons, brimming with emotions and deep curiosity, I felt spent as I reached this month’s doorstep. Over the last two weeks I found myself reflecting on all my own very personal changes and the global devastation that has been present in the news, changes that felt quite sudden and weather events that have caused immense loss.

August Greetings!

It's hard to believe that we are nearing the end of the summer. This has been a big season for me!

Over the last six years I took a break from traveling by plane and began exploring other realms and places through meditation and mediumship. I felt invigorated when I arrived in Italy a few weeks ago. I landed in the same place that I had my first international experience decades ago. The land immediately activated the indescribable cellular romance and inspiration that only the Florence vibration evokes within me. It brought me to tears. I started to feel lighter, creative ideas began to flow with ease, and I had access to a sense of freedom that I haven't felt in years.

Happy July!

It felt like no coincidence that Crab Spider arrived in our house as we shifted into Cancer season last month. When I pointed the first visitor out to Jason, he told me Crab Spiders are distinct in the spider kingdom with their legs set at a forward angle that enables them not only to skitter forward and back but to scuttle side to side - just like a crab!

These unique spiders would show themselves to me on different walls and on the ceiling at different points of the day, and one even sidestepped its way across the living room floor one night like a dancer. Their presence in our house held the symbol of this astrological season, the Crab, firmly in my mind. These omnipresent, 8-legged friends cued me to lean into Crab medicine and reminded me of the power in being able to move sideways.

Greetings to you and to June!

The approach to this month felt like coming down a slow and narrow corridor leading toward a rebirth. It was a time filled with lessons on love, acceptance, and second-chances. After Max's passing, I felt emotionally bombarded with grief around not just his death but the unexpected opening of old wounds related to motherhood, belonging, and worthiness. By the time June arrived, I found myself not quite ready to be birthed back into the world. I needed to find a space for continued gestation, to mature in the lessons that barreled into my awareness during the eclipses and happenings of April and May. This past weekend I decided to give myself permission to take a pause and continue to develop.

January held unusually dense energy as many new astrological placements swirled through the heavens. In this heavy time, as the planet Mars was stationing from his retrograde, I found myself processing a lot of personal and collective anger. As these feelings washed over me, it was difficult to believe that better times for the collective would be on the horizon.

So I turned to the compassionate spirit world for guidance. One of my guides began to greet me on my evening walks with Max. He would glide into my awareness ever so quickly and then disappear. These brief encounters piqued my curiosity, and I knew it was time to turn to him and sink into his medicine. He spoke to me about the path to eldership and let me know that my way forward lies in learning to transmute my judgment into curiosity. His lessons were painful, and he asked me to start releasing the toxins that judgement has stored in my body.

Happy New Year! I hope that the year is treating you gently so far!

This time of year often leaves me feeling like I'm a bit in between, like sitting between the space of start and stop, or stop and start. When a weekly email I receive from Nature Evolutionaries described this time as one of bringing a mixed heart, being pulled to quiet yet in the mix of activity and recovery, it gave words to how I've been feeling. I tend to greet the new year with a mixed heart. It is a time that collectively holds a sense of urgency for new plans and new commitments, yet I find myself incredibly tired. This year I'm owning the need to sink into the in between as I am finally consciously preparing for my journey through the winter months.

Today marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year, when the ancients would spend time in contemplation, performing ceremonies to honor their gods and goddesses and rituals to beckon the return of the Sun.

It wasn't until I started to recognize my ancient roots and work with my vibrant ancient ancestors that my relationship to light and dark started to shift. I was able to start sitting with the darker sides of myself without anxiety as nighttime approached. I was able to walk outside at night with greater comfort, connecting with my mother's mother's people, who would travel by ski over the snow, and to my mother's father's people who would read the night sky. I no longer felt alone in the dark, I felt connected to something greater and supported in digging deeper into my own shadows.

For some we are entering the best time of the year. For others this can be the most confronting span on the calendar. The holidays bring up so much emotion and memory, perhaps joyful and maybe filled with grief and frustration. Personally, this time of year can challenge my beliefs around belonging, family and friendship. I’ve been sitting with the spirit of all this polarizing energy and asking what is mine and what isn’t mine. I've been asking what is supporting my healing and opening my awareness, and what bogs me down and does not allow me to access my truth.

It's hard to believe that this past weekend marked the middle of October. I hope that the fall has met you with grace. And if it hasn't, my hope is that ease is finding you now!

It has been a bit tricky here for the last month. Covid hit our household, and it demanded that I come to a complete stop. I didn't realize just how fast I was running. Even though I thought I had a new approach to my schedule, it was clear that I was still on the run, and not just physically but also mentally. In this abrupt stop I was able to start to unravel both what I had been running from and towards. The slowness asked me to work through some density from the past that had congealed in and around me. I had to go deep into another time in my history, seeing how it was influencing my present and the future I was running towards. I'm continuing to dance my way through what has been shown and revealed to me, knowing that it will be a slow dance to resolution, not a quick step routine.

The house we’re renting sits up on a hill. It has a wall of windows and makes me feel like I'm in a tree house. It’s so different compared to the house we sold in the fall; it was full of timber beams and wide-planked floors and felt like being on a ship. Certain vantage points in our old house gave me a feeling like I could walk right onto the river’s surface. Now we’re nestled up in the trees looking down on the river. This perch offers a whole new perspective of and on the river and a new relationship with the wind. Where I used to sit with the trunk of the trees now I feel like I’ve climbed the trucks and am sitting in a nook where two branches meet.

I woke up Monday morning to a sense of anticipation in the air. The Woodpeckers are a peckin', the Osprey are perched back in their nests, the Geese are at the pond, the Peepers are a peepin' in the evenings, and the Robbins are hopping about in the growing grass. Change and birth is visible to the eye and tangible to the hands and feet. If you listen hard enough, you can hear the Earth birthing a symphony of new life. No wonder this transitional time from winter to spring feels like being in the in-between and always asks so much of my physical and emotional bodies.

Happy Spring!

It's hard to believe that we are approaching the last days of March. The transition to spring has always been a bit tricky for me. The shift in temperature and how it lands in my body and bones always leaves me a bit achy and rattled. My walks with Max are different as the landscape has shifted so dramatically. All the ice and snow has melted revealing what’s been lying underneath all these months. Dirty paws and boots from the mud leave me mourning the snow cover and crunch underneath my steps at night.

Wednesday marked a powerful new moon in Pisces. I took some time to sense into Pisces and saw images of connectedness, empathy, compassion and intuition. This particular new moon was deeply aligned with Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system with a magnetic field around 14 times stronger than the magnetic field found on Earth. Jupiter asks for expansion, expanding what we are planting through our actions, words and thoughts. As I sit witnessing our neighbors in the Ukraine being invaded by Russia and in return birthing more refugees to the world, the continued impact of Covid-19, radical political discord, and increasingly open acts racial injustice, I am left to question: what I am doing in this material world and what are my thoughts generating?

Max and I often journey through a neighbor's field on our afternoon walks. It's a great opportunity for exercising his nose and exercising my balance as I never quite know when that crunchy layer of snow is going to give way under my foot and turn into soft, hollow snow. As I move across the partially frozen field, I have to really tune into the moment to anticipate how my feet are going to be received by the ice and snow. Yet, the sound of the crunching snow as my ice cleats hit the surface of the ground often propels my awareness and memory back to the energy of another time, something distinct from my experience and memories in this body. This might sound crazy, but it isn't a rare occurrence for me. I've learned to ask- "Is this ancestral?" And then ask "Is this the energy of a past life?" And sometimes the answer is - "Both." I have seen through my own personal shamanic healing and through working with shamanic clients, that we can have a previous incarnation along an ancestral line. I have experienced how those energies can become tangled, perhaps even confused and amplified.