New Moon Ritual: August 2024

For those who aren’t signed up to receive my monthly newsletter, I ended up using the July 2024 new moon ritual for some personal stuff and opted not to provide a public post.

Imagine reliving a “greatest hits” of the times in your life when you felt most powerless. Sounds great, right? That is how the message of this ritual started. Admittedly, I was buckling up for a long night. Eventually, however, I started to notice a different theme present in all of these memories - yes, these were moments I felt powerless, but it was small acts of kindness and care that helped to dig me out of those holes.

I eventually realized the message coming through was about the monumental impact we have on the people around us, sometimes in ways we don’t even realize. That is a very important thing to realize right now, especially while we grapple with so many enormous, existential crises that we too often feel powerless to do anything about.

Additionally, I think part of the message this month is bringing our focus back down to the interpersonal - whether that is to one-on-one relationships, or the relationships within our community. Too often we can swept up in the media spectacle of national and international events, being manipulated by algorithms that profit off of stoking our most negative of emotions, and we neglect the ways we can positively impact the world immediately around us.

And the good we do on the local and interpersonal level is cumulative. When we uplift someone we strengthen them to then uplift someone else, and so on and so on. In a very real way, one of the best ways we can grapple with those gigantic global crises is by started a ripple effect through those around us.