Oh, Sweet Life

Full moon at 24° Leo

I’ve been just captivated by Virginia Shepley’s portal paintings this week. This piece is titled Everything. It is clearly depicting the Cosmos speaking an intention to create itself. Or maybe its the Portal we enter and leave this world through. Or maybe those are the same thing.

February live events

Saturday, February 15th - 10am to noon - Irvine, CA - Celebration of Life for Lynne Marie Cocklin Dresman, my mom.

I recently listened to Anderson Cooper’s interview of siblings David and Amy Sedaris, where they talk about grief, about the aftermath of losing their mom. And David says something like, “I understand my job as a writer now is to get other people to love my mother as much as I do.” David! Oy. Yeah. That just captured so much of where I am at right now. I am sending this full moon post from Southern California this week, where I’ve flown down to lead a service on Saturday honoring my mom Lynne. If you knew her at all, and want to join us for a public service celebrating her life, please feel welcome, truly. We will cherish all support, both in-person and on the astral plane. The service will be held at Irvine United Church of Christ, a church she served as an assistant pastor at back when I was a kid - 4915 Alton Pkwy, Irvine, CA 92604. Arrival time is 10am, the service itself will be an hour from 10:30-11:30, and you can linger after for coffee and donuts and hugs if you wish, or just drive off into the day, tenderized by the gift of life.

Friday, February 21st - 6:30pm - 8:30pm - Newberg, OR - Live Poetry Event

Fellow Write Bloody poet Miriam Kramer is coming to Oregon next week! Miriam is a queer Jewish poet who calls New Jersey home, and her book Built By Storms came out last year to devastate all of us, it won the Jack McCarthy Book Prize and absolutely deserved it. You can catch her in Portland at Slamlandia on 2/20, and I will be reading with her on 2/21 at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg, about 45 minutes SW of Portland. You can get tickets to that here. I don’t know that I’ve lived through a time where sitting in rooms listening to poetry with other people was more life giving. I hope to see you out there!

Reading for the full moon at 24° Leo

Wednesday morning, February 12th at 5:35am PST, the moon is full and bright and feeling her entire celestial Self at 24° of Leo, the blazing cosmic fire cat. Leo’s ruler is the Sun, so its territory is light, and heat, and radiance, and full solar aliveness. For us in the north, the Leo full moon always arrives in the middle or “dead” of winter, when the lifeforce is at its most frozen and lifeless. It opens this powerful and much-needed wormhole to the energies of the peak of summer; to remembering, viscerally, where the cycle has been, and where it is leading. Leo fire is really inner fire, our creative instincts and energies, and the irrepressible nature of every individual living being—the specific light and heat that each of us is here to radiate. And the moment you really feel that is the moment you start to comprehend your own uniqueness, and the actual miracle of the gifts you bring, in the context, of course, of an ever-creating, ever-evolving cosmos. There are hidden spiritual teachings that can be learned through each of the Zodiac archetypes, and Leo’s has something to do with how each of us is a Sun; how each of is, somehow, a center of the universe. And that when you are aligned with your own spirit to this degree, when you center yourself there, you also tap the clear, pure cosmic Spirit, and then that Spirit taps you. And then the life party, the one that only you can throw, can really get started.

On a full moon in Leo, Leo’s ruler the Sun is in Leo’s opposite sign, Aquarius. While all full moons activate this tension between opposed or complementary signs, when there’s a rulership also involved, we feel it even more. Leo and Aquarius are asking us to hold the tension or paradox of the I and the We. How can we know that ultimately, our individuality is an illusion, that we are each just a part of something collective and greater (Aquarius), and also know that every one of us is special, that our specific life matters, and that discovering and developing our uniqueness fully and expressing it authentically matters (Leo)? As the full moon arrives, and in the days the follow, the emphasis is on Leo, and making sure that its shadow energies are being well integrated. So in the middle of a season emphasizing our collectivity, and really an era in which we will need to be coming from that wisdom and collective consciousness in order to survive, you are being asked to feel back into the boundaries of your individuality, practice some benevolent narcissism, and make it about you—who are you, in your heart, in your soul and spirit and body and mind, who are you? What is your style? What do you want? What creative response to the world, and being alive in it at this time, has been brewing in you? What gifts are you here to give and receive?

This Leo full moon is in a highly invigorating, almost-exact square with Uranus over at 23° Taurus, which is giving it even more kapow. Uranus is placing a constraint on our Leo gifts and energies that are peaking right now, but in a catalyzing way. It wants to activate or especially celebrate those unique gifts and creative impulses that serve the massive change its been working on bringing to how we relate, fundamentally, to our resources. Uranus is about freedom and revolution and breakthrough. It has been in Taurus since 2018, and it’s now in the final perfecting year of its transit. In the collective sense, it’s been trying to gets us to break up with any toxic or simply outmoded traditions here, and in Taurus, “here” is the physical earth, and how, through it and with it, we manifest material abundance. We are in an existential crisis because of human over-extraction of resources to meet the demands of forever growth, and the desire of a few to have far far more than they need. In a closed system, like we have here on Earth, that’s the path to destruction. The path away from that in Taurus, away from over-consumption and toward balance and right relationship, goes through slowing down enough to develop a profound sensitivity and appreciation for what we already have—a feel for the life-giving abundance already here. Like don’t just eat an orange without noticing its sweetness, and its concentrated sunlight; without a nod to the Earth and the soil and the insects and the rain and the hands of the people that picked the orange, and everything that brought it to you. Eat an orange, and experience, for real, how rich you are.

So lets imagine that this moment of clarity and celebration of your gifts, brought to you by the Leo full moon, and the current of healing and liberation being kicked off in its wake, wants you to use more freedom than you are using now. And it wants you to direct that freedom toward loving your life, and loving all life on this Earth, and eating oranges like you really mean it. And then it wants you to see and feel more of what your creative part is and will be, in helping us all get freer from the trance of too much comfort; the trance of wanting more than we really need; the trance of expensing your life to the Earth, without knowing what that really costs. It wants you to, in your own style and way, make great art with your life, as payment for this incredible gift of life. And if there is anything getting in the way of that—there always is, we are only human—any fears or insecurities, any old stories, any blocks to loving yourself enough to invest in and believe in your own unique offerings, this full moon in Leo wants to help you call in a big healing.

It seems important to also remember that Mars—which gives us a direct line to our life force, and acting on it—stationed retrograde in Leo back on December 6th. It moved all the back through Leo to Cancer, the Moon’s home sign, where it’s been reflecting on combining fearlessness and compassion, on being a warrior for care. It will finally be stationing direct on February 23rd, in Cancer, and then it will slowly make its way back through all the degrees it retrograded through. By the time it re-enters Leo, and re-activates all the energies there, it will be April 17th—it will be the end of the first month spring. I’m saying all of this not to take us out of the river of what’s happening now, but to remind us that we are all in the middle of a larger unfolding process. And everything happening now, in the winter, everything we imagine and feel and envision, is connected to what will be able to come up and breakthrough in the spring. If you feel stuck in the frozen earth as it were, and you can’t feel your creative lifeforce, or any love for your own life; if all you can feel is despair, or anger, or overwhelm; that makes sense for the situation we are in. And I’m guessing it makes sense for the situation you’ve been in personally. See if you can let this full moon help you locate one point of light, one small seed of faith, one thing you love and are grateful for, and then another, and then another. Let it pour you a shot of belief in yourself, and your powers of creative adaptation. Raise that shot glass towards the Sun. Give thanks. Then ask for what you need, to heal and come alive even more. Because we need you. We need your life. We need your gifts. You matter.

Something personal

If I can’t get personal on a Leo moon, then what am I even doing?

Six months ago, the moon was new at 12° of Leo, on a Sunday - Sunday, August 4th. That was the day I got the call from my sister that she was now certain my mom would dying very soon, and I should fly down to California to be with her. I had just written and posted for the new moon the day before — I called it The Diamond of the Self. Compared to the astrology before it and after it, it was pretty exuberant. Venus was in Leo, fresh off another invigorating square from Uranus in Taurus. I wrote that it was like “this loving, resourcing, recentering moment, right before the energies start spinning fast again.” That was certainly true for me. I got to take a breath that weekend, and then I was plunged into an epic underworld journey, accompanying my mom as she left her body and completed this incarnation, and then receiving the potent medicine of acute grief.

As an Aquarius rising, Leo styles my 7th house of close, intimate partnerships. This is the house where I am, in some ways, most alive—in intimate, one on one connections with others. I have my natal Jupiter here as well, so it’s also where I am most generous. I love so hard. And while I knew about the incredible power of being there when someone is born, when my mom died, I learned that there is no greater catalyst for closeness and intimacy than being with someone at their death. So this last Leo new moon was a massive initiation for me, and the beginning of a whole new understanding of relationships, and what was possible. And it kicked off a whole new level of relationship between me and my mom. These are, of course, deeply personal and spiritual matters, and I won’t trouble you now with too much of what I have come to believe about death, (there will be so many Pluto-inspired writings, I’m sure, over the next 18 years about just this.) I will just say that I am closer to my mom now than we were ever able to get while she was alive. Which—I know how that sounds. And I also know there’s many of you out there who know what I’m talking about already, and are nodding your heads.

I planned her public memorial service for this coming Saturday, February 15th, in part, because it would be just in the wake of the Leo full moon, just as that current had come to a close, and when I might just be ready for the celebration and release of a community ritual. It has been an intense emotional labor and an intense art-making labor, getting to a place where not only could I share my grief process more widely, but I could hold space for other people’s grief and feelings about my mom. What I didn’t anticipate was that, by syncing all this up with a Leo moon current, there would be so much real pleasure in the process. Like, that a “Celebration of Life” could actually feel celebratory. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I will be full crying during the service. I am giving a “sermon” style eulogy, where I get to talk about grief as a state of enlightenment, and about my mom, and it will stir up a lot of sadness. But there is real joy coming through, too. It feels like a larger lesson I need to learn well for these times we are in—that it is possible to marry grief to celebration, appreciation, and pleasure. Maybe not at first—fresh grief hurts too much. But over time, grief waters and fertilizes the ground of our being. This enormous trial of loving, it gives you strength, and new growth, new love, new joy, is inevitably nurtured. The heart and its projects expand.

A few weekends back, my dear friend Rick Klaras spent a good chunk of his Saturday listening to and editing recordings of my mom’s voice, from an interview I did with her back in 2016 about her life as a death worker. It was a very profound and emotional experience, to get to work with her transmission about life and death so directly, and then just to hear her speaking to me after all this time—for my ears to be receiving her voice again. We were weaving a few pieces of it into a 5-minute recording I could play at her celebration, because what would be more perfect than my mom getting to have the last words at her own service? What could be more Leo, than honoring her life through her voice? I wanted to share it with you all here, too. We scored it with a piece of music, Hania Rani reworking Ólafur Arnalds Woven Song on piano, so that’s what you will hear behind her voice.

You’ll hear her, first thing, briefly tell the story of the tortoise, which some of you now know because of my poem, To Be Sure of the Road, Close Your Eyes and Walk in the Dark, which I wrote in the days after the election, about my mom’s dying. I shared it publicly a few times, at Emily Mundy’s book release reading, at the Coffee and Grief event put on by Anne Gudger, and here, in a winter Solstice post for paid subscribers. I have made that post available now for all subscribers, in honor of her memorial. Please click on the poem title if you would like to read it again or for the first time. And if you want to hear my mom’s transmission straight from the source, here it is:

Virginia made this piece when her mother died, it’s called Changing Planes. She reports that her mother’s death was, luckily, “a peaceful passing. She felt in control and she was ready. Such a fiery spirit crossing.”

Ritual & Writing Prompts

For paid subscribers, below are some shortcut links to the archive of Leo writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now as well as some specific suggestions for ritually working with this full moon. And as always, a generative creative writing prompt in the key of Leo full mooning.

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions! Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, adapt it in any way you see fit.)

The Leo archive

The Diamond of the Self - new moon at 12° of Leo (summer 2024)

Everything In You That You Don't Need, You Can Let Go Of - full moon at 4° of Leo (winter 2024)

The Fire Under Our Tongues - new moon at 23° of Leo (summer 2023)

Venus in the Underworld - Venus retrograde in Leo (summer 2023)

The Sun at the Center of You - full moon at 16° of Leo (winter 2023)