🌒 Crossing into the Deep Darkness 🐕
We’re moving through the end of autumn and into the beginning of winter — the dark half of the year. Honestly, sometimes it feels hard to go there. The stillness, the slowing down, the invitation to rest — these can feel like resistance in a world that measures our worth in what we do. When I find myself hurrying to achieve in order to slow down, that’s when I know I’m off my game and disconnected from Wisdom.
Our culture tells us to keep producing, achieving, optimizing. Even our “self-care” often turns into another performance of productivity. Real healing? That’s something else entirely and it isn’t a brand. We can’t prove we are ok and we can’t save ourselves. We can just be present to an unmaking. A remembering.
In the West, we love the image of the rugged Self-Starter — the Independent. We idealize the Rebel who bucks conformity. But can we please be honest that we aren’t given the view to know what to replace it with? That makes it harder to stop and rest, too.
We sense that community is key, but we’re still relearning how to care. So many of us struggle with knowing how to give and receive, how to show up tenderly in a culture that tells us to “give no f**ks.”
Well… I give all the f**ks. 💗
And then I let them go. 🌬️
All the way. Into the great not-knowing. The fertile dark.
The mystery that holds us all.
We’re approaching the cross-quarter time — the midpoint between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice. It is nearly Samhain in the Celtic calendar, soon Día de los Muertos in Mexico, then All Souls / All Saints in the Christian world. The veil is thin between this and the other realms. Ancestors close. Mortality near. Mystery palpable.
On the Chinese clock, this is the time of the Pericardium — the Minister of the Heart. 💖 The pericardium holds the heart in the biological body, and it is the protector of what’s most precious in the symbolic body. The gentle gatekeeper that knows when to open and when to close. This is also the interface where the inner emotions manifest and blooms as either inspiration or disease.
Interesting that the Pericardium times with the Dog lunation 🐕 — loyal, grounded, faithful. Summer’s outer brightness fades, all of its manifestation falls away the same as the trees defoliate. Now, we strip down to the inner chamber, the heart, the warmth of true connection, the hearth of what really matters. I’m not trying to wax poetic: I’m just telling you what this season is.
The thing about the Pericardium and the Dog is that it is about RETURN. It’s Jueyin, for the nerds in the audience. The letting go allows a return, a recall to something.
Today begins the Dog moon 🐕 a time to ask yourself:
Who are your people?
What are you loyal to?
When the lights dim, and only the embers glow, who is there? 🔥
How do we connect?
In order to connect, we let go of what’s ready to return to the soil.
Let the Earth rest.
Let yourself rest.
This is how the next cycle will be born. 🌑✨ Not for awhile yet. Staying in that not-knowing is really the only job right now. Especially in a Yin Wood Snake year.
So as a reminder, our Snake Assembly Chinese Polestar Astrology cohort has just begun meeting for classes 🐍 and we’re still welcoming new students. If you’ve been feeling the call to go deeper — into the stars, the mystery, and the living web that connects it all — now is the time to step in.
We’ve got some events at the clinic, notably a classical flutist on November 7 and you can come party with us. I’ll be giving a talk. This link has ticket info using Groupmuse: please support this artist.
I’m here if you want to talk about what’s going on in your chart on a zoom call.
But overall: please just take care of yourself. Go see your acupuncturist, whomever that is. Take some time and just enjoy a world draped in yellowed leaves and the withered beginnings of a deeper decay. Soon it will be so dark. Let’s all be here for each other as we all let go.
🕯️ With love,
Anne