Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps?
We are in the midst of a powerful full moon in Scorpio – can you feel it? The tension of the opposites playing out with an intensity that calls each of us to tend with care while we navigate this new territory revealed by the bright moonlight. Depending on where this full moon shows up in your natal astrology chart, the effects of the full moon will be played out on particular stages of your life – identity, money, home, faith, self-expression etc.
For me, this full moon is illuminating my 4th and 10th houses – the house of home and the house of social status. This is the dance between the private self and the public self – the parts we want to keep held close to our heart, sewn into the hems of our clothes, whispered into the pages of our journal, and the parts that we have on full display, what we want to be known for, that which we want to be recognised by the world beyond.
And so this full moon comes with an awareness of my own visibility in the world, it calls me out into the light, all the while the shadows continue to offer such tender and gracious acceptance.
Because I don’t know about you, but for me, I am in a near-constant relationship with my own visibility, which, at times, can feel quite imprisoning. Which, I think, is something that many women experience, for we have been conditioned to experience ourselves as the subject of the world’s gaze. John Berger spoke to this in his book Ways of Seeing…
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
And Margaret Atwood also spoke of this in her novel The Robber Bride…
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
You are your own voyeur… I find that incredibly haunting, for truly, it so deeply resonates.
And so when I then read the following from Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves, I am so struck with longing, I almost lose my breath…
“Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears as it snaps its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right.”
We just are, and it is right.
As we move through this powerful lunar influence of the Scorpio full moon, the dark places of the psyche that Scorpio rules – sex, death, taxes, fears, anxieties, truth, intimacy – are bathed in light and brought into soft focus by persistent moonbeams. No matter if the axis of this full moon falls in your chart the same as my own, there is something of the shadow in each of us that is calling to be seen and acknowledged.
And for that reason and so many more, I am grateful for this week’s goddess. Who, I should add, in her asteroid form is sitting close by the Sun as it casts it light upon the opposing Moon. Her story, her wisdom, is very much in the mix here too. Read on to find out who she is and what she wishes to share with us….
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This week’s goddess is… Inanna.
This ancient Sumerian goddess once visited her sister Erishkegel in the underworld and was stripped of everything in the process. However, she was reborn into true sovereignty, and her story tells us a lot about the process of identity creation and the power of facing our shadow self.
When I opened the door to today I am facing a white wall and the sun is somewhere behind my right shoulder. It is casting my shadow in sharp relief onto the wall, and I find myself fixated with just how perfectly rendered it is. There are no fuzzy outlines. No vagueness to its form. Crystal clear definition. A shadow self – myself reflected as if in a dark mirror. I ask Innana if she has a message for us, and she says…
“See your shadow”
And when she says “see” she means “SEE”. We’re not talking about a cursory glance here. This seeing goes to the very heart of things. This seeing is sacred witnessing.
And yet, how can we play sacred witness to our shadow? It’s such an amorphous, intangible thing. Slippery and evasive.
Well, I have found my shadow is most present when I make judgements about others. I project my shadow – the parts of me that I am refusing to see, refusing to claim as my own – onto others. We all do.
And so, when I make a judgement about a celebrity in a gossip mag, or a fellow passenger on the bus, or a politician on the news, or a noisy neighbour etc. that is my opportunity to see my shadow. To witness it being expressed, even if it remains unspoken.
For example, when I watch others behaving in ways that I judge to be intolerant, my shadow is calling my attention to all the ways in which I too am intolerant. It’s not doing this so that I can castigate myself – beat myself up for being a horrible person. It’s doing this so that I can bring that aspect of myself into awareness. So that I can then consciously choose to operate from a place of loving compassion for both myself and for others, from a place of integration, from wholeness.
What judgements have you been aware of recently? How is your shadow being illuminated? What does Inanna want you to know?
PS The Goddess Guides for May are all set to be sent out tomorrow. But there is still time if you would like me to send one out to you.
The May Goddess Guides contain not only your very own goddess of the month, but also the group goddess of the month (Cybele – Goddess of Wild Women), the group oracle of the month (The Star), the Celtic Tree Full Moon interpretation (Willow – Enchantment), and an introduction to the month’s astrological archetype (Taurus).
So, if you would like to know which goddess will be stepping forward for you this Beltane, then please do sign up. There are 2 subscription levels – the second of which includes monthly 1-on1 time with me where we dive deep into what’s present for you in this moment, before turning to the tools at my disposal – ogham, tarot, astrology and more….
Subscriptions can be cancelled at any time. However, my hope is that discovering your goddess of the month will become a highlight for you as it has become for so many others.
To sign up, simply follow this link and you’ll find more details along with payment options.
I wonder which goddess will step forward for you…
