new moon (newness, or not)

I have never been confident about setting new moon intentions. I've read the guidelines many people online share about their ideas of how to do this, and attempted to follow many of them, but it's never really jelled for me. The attempts have felt haphazard, forced, half-cocked and unsurprisingly as a result I've seen entire months go by with no evidence of the changes I've desired to see in my life manifest. So I stopped doing them. Maybe for an entire year...

Then this month, out of the blue, my sidekick brought the idea back and suggested we give it a try again. I think she had probably kept up the practice, she's good about using tools like this. She has a much wiser understanding of astrology too, which might give her efforts more oomph When she made this suggestion to try it out this month, I had not even been aware that the moon had gone dark in the sky, haha ;) and didn't know it was the evening before the new moon.

So here's what I didn't do, and what I did do. First off, the idea of doing it, even though I knew I'd struggle with it, didn't seem so difficult this time. Maybe because I had let go of the practice for so long. And what I didn't do was rush online and use the google to get suggestions and instructions on how to set your intentions. What I did do was meditate.

Inside my meditation I had an entirely brand new type of experience. I felt the deep darkness of the moonless sky as a sea of space in my heart center. As if my heart space contained the entirety of the universe and space where the moon resides. I felt that vastness and was awed by it. Then I verified that I understood that the moon was about to begin a brand new monthly cycle of it's journey through time and space. I bowed to and honored her, inside my heart. Before this moment I didn't even know what it was that I desired to experience change in my life, and I sat there, in this darkness waiting for my dearest need to identify itself.

And then I realized what it was. The one thing that is lacking in my life right now is companionship of the sort that I have become accustomed to having at many different and wonderful times in my life. My longest term companion is going through major changes in her life right now (shes starting a family) and simply does not have free time to hang out with me the way she has wanted to for many years on end. I have come to accept this as a change that I have very little say over influencing. She's just gotta do what she's gotta do in taking care of herself, and spending time with her family mates. This has created a large and noticeable void in my life though.

So there is more symbolic dark space in my life that seemed to sync up with the darkness of the moonless sky. I took this void and placed it at the base of the space where the moon begins to start it's journey through time this month. It was like I planted a seed, not necessarily of desire, but of acknowledgement of what is changing for me.

Almost two weeks have passed since the new moon phase began and nothing has changed. On a couple of occasions I contemplated and offered up the idea of meeting someone new as a prayer during my meditations. I also consulted my pendulum because at the beginning of this year the pendulum had given me reason to believe that I might in fact meet someone new by the month of July this year. The last chance I had to mingle with potential new friends was when my sidekick and I were taking meditation classes together earlier this year. We were jerked out of that class abruptly when the pandemic struck and I had not taken opportunity to obtain the phone numbers of any of the people I had met there. Not that I had even felt any particular interest in any of them, but still, beginnings are beginnings, and you never know what might have developed.

So yesterday my sidekick told me that she was seeing developments of her new moon intentions for this month developing already. I checked back in with mine, and just acknowledged to myself that I've seen no change.

Today though, some thoughts did occur to me while I was driving along a long and twisty country road. I surveyed my history of having companions in my life. There have not been many, but there have been "types" that have created manners of patterns. Two of my most significant companions were older women. Sita was the first. That was in the 1990s. She was someone I met at the ashram. She was a spiritual guide for me. The next older woman was Deirdre, who became my lover. That was in the late 90s. The final older woman companion (other than my mother) was an anthropology teacher named Jane. Her influence was never experienced outside of the classroom, but she caused a spiritual and creative awakening to occur for me. And of course my mother was the ultimate older woman companion who I spent the majority of my life being influenced by. Then there were the equal aged, and younger women that I've had for companions. There was Susan and Denise during the late 1980s, they were my age and were intellectual friends. In the 2010s I had many short term, and one long term younger women companions when I was doing my Cemetery Girl photo project. Aside from Deirdre, no one has ever been a girlfriend, but the one long term young woman friend, there have been times when in my own heart I called her my girlfriend.

So to shorten this assessment, what I had a momentary glimpse of as an idea on this drive in the country was that maybe now I've finally reached the stage of my life where I no longer need to have a companion. Its become entirely normal for me to now spend the majority of the time of my life alone, and I feel quite content about that. There used to be a burning desire inside of me to have someone to spend my life with, but no matter how bright that fire of desire burned, I could attract no one to myself. And I do know that this is how the fulfillment of desire (and manifestation) is supposed to work, when you get to the point where you are content with being without, what you truly desire and need will come to you. I used to try to trick myself into claiming that I was desire free, to try to fool the universe. But now, after all these years and decades of basically being alone, if God were to appear and say, "Son, this is the way it's going to be for you until your dying day...", I feel fine about it being this way.

What a wordy fool I am, to have taken up all this time and space to tell you what I just said. I apologize for taking up your time if you sat here and read this. It felt good to me to condense my wondering tho.