New Moon Ritual: January 2024
This post is a little late because the three days immediately following this ritual were both incredibly busy at work, and I experienced a small flare up that pretty much knocked me out for twelve hours. What is that joke that is going around the internet right now? “I’m always surprised when my disability actually disables me.”
This was the first divination ritual of 2024! It’s wild to think this all started a year ago with my Call To Action: Tending To The Dead post.
There was one overwhelming feeling that kept coming through during this month’s ritual: love. I think, because of how politically active I am and this being a very turbulent presidential election year where I live, I was expecting something a little more action oriented, so it took a while for this message to get through to me. It was almost like I was waiting to meet up with someone and they were standing right in front of me, but I didn’t recognize them so I kept looking past them and around them, until they had to grab me by the shirt and yell “It’s me, you idiot!”.
Once I stopped getting in my own way, I was able to receive and process the power behind this message. For those of us in marginalized communities, especially those that don’t fit the worldview of the cis white supremacist Christian Nationalism that has roared to power, I think we sometimes forget how one of the most powerful tools of resistance we have in our arsenal is love.
Those that seek to oppress us, that seek to erase us from public life, want us to be miserable. They want us to feel ashamed of who we are. They want us to be afraid to be our authentic selves. They want guilt and fear to box us into ways of being that they deem appropriate. Or, if that doesn’t work, they want us dead.
In the face of all of that loving yourself, loving your community, loving loudly and proudly and authentically is a radical and powerful act of resistance. Not only can love free ourselves from the shame and guilt and fear they try to pile onto us, love serves as a beacon for the rest of our community who might still be trapped in the darkness of oppression. It is a light at the end of the tunnel for them, guiding them towards self-liberation and a community that values them.
We’re going to need a lot of love this year, for ourselves and our communities, but the sense I get from this message is that centering love in our push for liberation and progress will guide us through what is coming.
