New Moon Ritual: December 2024 Black Moon
We’re ending 2024 with a Black Moon, which somehow seems appropriate. What is a “Black Moon”? Well, you may have heard of its counterpart the Blue Moon. There are a handful of meanings for the term “Blue Moon” but one of the most common is a bit of modern American folklore* - the second full moon in a calendar month. A “Black Moon” then, in this understanding, is the second new moon in a calendar month.
The best way I can describe the message I received is: map out your social network. I don’t mean who engages with you most on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. I mean who do you know in your life, what is your relationship to them, what skills or knowledge do they possess, how accessible are they, etc. I also want to stress this is not some sort of “ranking” of the people in your life.
Hyper-individualism - often romanticized in the United States as “rugged individualism” - is a toxic concept with the ultimate goal of keeping us weak by making us ashamed to ask for or accept help. We are, at our core, social creatures. We developed to survive in community, and community is where we thrive. And one of the best parts of engaging in community is that it lessens the need to be an expert in all things.
Over and over the ancestors delivered the same instructions: understand what you are good at and grow those skills, but also understand what those around you are good at and know how to engage with them. You can think of this as mutual aid if you want, or as an anti-capitalist approach to skill sharing. Whatever you call it, at the end of the day the signs were clear that this is the needed approach to weather the coming storm.
And, if you believe in the idea of Tower Time as I do and adhere to Byron Ballard’s sense that the Tower has indeed fallen, the lessons imparted by the ancestors will also provide us with the building blocks for building something better. Does it matter that these blocks are ancestral, ancient, proven ways of taking care of each other instead of whatever new fad dreamed up by a tech bro? No. Things work because they work.
So then what is all this about a map of your social network? This is, ultimately, a deep understanding about 1) who makes up your community, 2) what your relationship is to them, 3) what niche they fill both in the community and in your personal life, and 4) your proximity to access to them or their knowledge/skills. At the center of this map is you, and you should also have a good understanding of what knowledge and skills you provide. Does centering yourself in this map make it inherently selfish? Not at all. Everyone’s map will have them at the center, that is the nature of things. What it highlights, or at least what it should highlight, is that all of these maps are connected through relationships - and relationship is at the core of what defines community. Not transaction. Not power. Not control.
*There are no verifiable references to the second full moon in a calendar months as a “Blue Moon” in American culture prior to the 1930’s. A more established meaning of the term is the third full moon in a season containing four but, in the United States at least, this is not the common usage.
