Full Moon in Gemini Ritual
Balancing anxiety with optimism
Inside: A message about the high discomfort of the Thanks/Taking holiday, and an invite to the Full Moon in Gemini ritual this Sunday at 5pm. We have more options than just feeling guilty or pretending things are fine. There is so much more beauty out there for us as a species if we’re willing to take the time to dream it.
Dear Reader,
I’ve been at my parents house for the past few days — though I haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving for decades, since I learned the horror of its true history.
I’m sure most of you feel the same way. If you’re following my work, you’re probably the one at the dinner table bringing up the history of genocide and telling the story of the Wampanoag village that a bunch of settlers burned to the ground.
A single white settler had been killed (probably in retaliation for some settler b.s.), and so the settlers murdered 500 Wampanoag men, women, and children. Colonizer math. 1 settler = 500 indigenous humans.
The Governor of Plymouth wrote in a letter that the Pilgrims would celebrate this massacre as a day of “thanks giving” for joy of slaughtering all the native people for the next 100 years.
It’s so obscene.
Many indigenous people call it a National Day of Mourning.
So, I don’t “celebrate” it. And yet, at this time of year, I often find myself among family. It’s one of the only times during the year when my whole family sees each other. I know many other folks who have the same situation — even people who’ve been harmed by the United States colonial project.
It’s been a joy to be here, to see my step father play with his model train set, and watch Rachel Maddow with my mother, and run around at the beach with my new gf and her dog. I hope you’ve all been having fun with your families too.
But how many of you gather every year with your people and then ask, “why is this country still celebrating this horrific holiday???”
Over the past 200 years, the United States has had over “1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of ANY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD against its indigenous people.”
One of the (many) horrifying things about capitalist colonialism is the way we find ourselves implicated in atrocities no matter what we do.
We try to have a dinner with family and we do it on stolen indigenous land.
We try to raise awareness about children being maimed in Palestine… by posting pictures on a phone made by enslaved children in the Congo.
I’m not just bringing this up in a full moon post to depress you.
My point in writing about this now – aside from the fact that I believe healing won’t come for our world until we tell the truth – is simply that I want to acknowledge our current cultural realities, because I don’t believe in witchcraft as painkiller.
I believe in witchcraft as medicine.
Our anxiety about our career choices won’t be healed by drinking 5 martinis.
Violence in the Middle East won’t be solved by pretending the murdered children had it coming.
True medicine doesn’t mask our discomfort. It weaves more connection into it. More relationality to a larger world.
The medicine of witchcraft is that it expands our capacity to hold multiple truths.
And the medicine of the Gemini Full Moon is that it helps us weave the connections between our optimism and our grief, our anxiety and our hope.
So often in my private sessions I find that my clients pain comes from believing in a very limited set of options. They can either be deliriously happy or suffer in agony for the rest of their lives.
The answer isn’t in the middle, it’s somewhere beyond what we think is possible.
We’ve just entered Sagittarius season, Sagittarius, half human, half beast, running in the wind, shooting off into the horizon.
The Full Moon is a time to dream, to listen to what comes from source.
It’s our small human minds that believe the only option is “a corporate job,” or a “two state solution”, or the “least annoying guy on Tinder” — we live in a plurivurse that has created comets and supernovas and whale songs and complex nervous systems.
There’s no limit to what is possible and what we can create. There’s no limit to the love and goodness we can bring into the world, or the joy that we can live in our own lives.
We have so many more options available to us, if we listen.
We have so much beauty available to us, if we’re willing to create it.
I hope you join me on Sunday evening at 5pm PST for our Full Moon in Gemini ritual.
We’ll be expanding our sense of possibility and listening for messages from the more-than-human world.
See you there!
Yours with love,
Amanda
*If you’re experiencing financial hardship and can’t afford a subscription right now, we have scholarships. I want these rituals to be accessible for all. You can email us at: guardian@oracleoflosangeles.com
Upcoming: Live Full Moon Ritual This Sunday
Sunday 11/26/23 at 5pm PST
On the Full Moon in Gemini, we will be listening for messages from the more-than-human world to help us expand our belief in what is possible. Messages will emerge in your psyche as the trance takes root. To join the ritual become a subscriber.