SEPTEMBER FULL MOON
in ARIES

The Rewards of Risk: Celebrating Abundance under a Harvest Moon

The Full Moon of September rises up strong and slowly from her horizon’s nest in the obsidian sky. This Moon is called a Harvest Moon, as it is the Full Moon closest to the equinox. Harvest Moons appear very large and very close to the Earth. This was the Moon that allowed humans to stay up late and collect crops, her nighttime moonbeams falling across the fields and illuminating growth for the gatherers. This Moon is also called the Barley Moon, the Corn Moon, the Autumn Moon, and the Drying Grass Moon, among other names. This September Harvest Moon brings a feeling of completion and appreciation. Take stock of what is time to end so that there is space to begin. This Moon offers abundance and is a harbinger of the changing seasons: the loss of Summer welcomes Autumn.

Looking back is important. We have to look back to see how far we’ve come. Remember a time when you wanted what you now have. Give thanks to yourself and to the universe for helping you help yourself. Think back to the New Moon last April. What was beginning at that point in your life? What has grown and changed since springtime?

Two days ago, we celebrated Mabon. This Pagan holiday, which is also the Autumnal equinox, is a time of thanksgiving for the harvest as well as a recognition of the darkness knocking on our doors. Name all the lessons that you were lucky enough to be alert to this season. Give thanks by enjoying the chill in the morning air and by recognizing all of the gifts around you: light and shadows both bring openings. Cook for others, count your blessings one by one like the geese that fly overhead, soaring arrows splashed against the slate sky. Clean your home, clear out your closets, organize your cupboards. Reacquaint yourself with the myth of Persephone. Remind yourself why the descent is necessary. Give yourself time to nap or enjoy a long cup of tea. Begin to ease into the Waning Moon time that Autumn correlates with on the Wheel of the Year.

This is also a time of reflection and of easing into the change of quietude. We are now half in and out of daytime and nighttime—the darkness creeps in now, bit by bit, minute by minute. This Moon could serve as a reminder to celebrate how the dark shows us the light. How darkness and light are only perceptions that aim to serve us through their reflections, and both of them fleeting besides. How the light changes and comes around again, and how light fading, the 
brilliant sunsets, and the glittering grey 9:00 pm sky hold their own poignant reminders that beauty is where one finds it. The clear shift of the seasons before our eyes can grant us the permission to change as well. We can let ourselves rest more, and shed old patterns. We can relinquish preoccupations that hinder us from expressing our courage, inspirations, and our fire. We can utilize the movement of change.

Change is one of the constants that humans fear the most. Our brains are evolved to want short-term answers, and most of us equate change with uncertainty which we correspond with loss which equals failure, disappointment, or lack of resources. Yet change is inevitable. It happens around us every day. The Earth rotates every 24 hours. We lose almost a million skin cells in that time. Seeds transform into stalks which bloom and then fade away to compost into the Earth where they began. Love moves from a spark to infatuation to an unconditional promise. Let this changing season remind us of all of the wonder and excitement that can be unearthed in all different kinds of change. The allowance of change and the ability to be flexible in the face of transformation is deep wealth. Any time we wish to progress, we will make mistakes. It is not the amount of successes or failures, lined up like marks on a wall, that determine your self-worth. A lot of value can be found in your devotion to continue tending to the soil that nourishes the seeds of your highest ideals.

At this Harvest Moon, this Corn Moon, this tenth lunation of this year, be attuned to where your energy, your efforts must go. When we are harvesting, we have to know what is ripe for plucking. Full Moons bring all the water up, up, up to the surface. That’s why most farmers gather their crops at this time: the fruits, herbs, and vegetables are plump and moist, filled with the H2O that the Moon, so close to us, has coaxed up out of the earth with her pull. When we are harvesting, we take only what we need. We leave an offering to the earth. We tend to the soil. We have a plan. We enjoy the fruits of our labor. We share them.

At this Harvest Moon, during this time of change, identify where your sources of abundance come from. Define what abundance means for you and you alone. Think of some tangible ways to keep this feeling fired up through the coming months, to keep the Harvest reverberating through the cold months we have ahead.

Abundance, obviously, is not always equated with a cornucopia of cold hard cash. For some of us, abundance could about possessing a plentitude of love, time, energy, health, inspiration, and creativity. Resources could mean a surplus of ingenuity, connectivity, and emotional support. Right now, it could mean knowing where everything is on your desktop, your room, and in your apartment. It could mean knowing where you stand with your most important relationships. It could mean getting clear on your value systems, your ideals, the mission statements that drive you into wider vantage points. Abundance could mean having the privilege to live in accordance with these ideals every day. Abundance is flexible and generous. Abundance could mean realizing the endless waterfalls of love you possess at any moment. It could be cultivating confidence, finding the bits of calm in the chaos.

Our culture generally equates abundance with MORE, when for many of us abundance is defined as LESS. Less distraction, less clutter, less complication, less obligation, less stress, less unrewarding work and imbalanced relationships. Abundance for you right now could mean getting simpler. Scaling back. Doing less.

For some of us, abundance can also be defined as nothing more than a slight shift. Living life with more awareness. Doing the same things, but with less fear or anxiety. It could mean having or feeling or enjoying the same sort of life you have currently, but developing a deeper relationship with your consciousness, with your experience of that life and the people in it. A more intimate or more profound experience with creativity, spirituality, or time. A different quality of life, a different relationship with conflict, a better quality of now.

Whatever abundance looks like to you at this Harvest Full Moon, name it. Claim it. Wrap your ready hands around it and clasp it against your third eye. Get brave enough to be able to grab your bounty. Speak your truths into existence. Run after this vision through the fog. Feel it rising in your chest like so many bloodstone butterflies. Gulp it down like hot cocoa. Be clear about what risks you’ll have to take to get it. Being more vulnerable. Giving yourself more space. Loving yourself enough to put yourself first. Get brave enough to sing to your desires until they can hear you through the throngs.

When manifesting abundance, our energy and intent must operate from a place of abundance. She’s generous: abundance gives as much as she receives. Abundance knows that one person’s gain is not their loss. Abundance is not in competition with anyone else. She’s got her own pebbled path in the forest that she lays down one stone at a time. Abundance is patient. She knows that so long as her efforts are enjoyable, and her work is important to her, that in time the reward might only be the satisfaction of years spent in flow, hours spent in splendor, refining a craft. Pleasure is the name of abundance’s game—giggles, delight, perversion, subversion, and irreverence can be found in the ample folds between abundance’s legs. Abundance believes in herself. Years of trying to prove everything to anyone around her
taught her this the hard way. Abundance thrives in space, and ample time: no breathlessly rushing to therapy for her! At this Full Moon time, consider the energy you are bringing into your space of manifestation. Consider the energy you bring to a space. Does it match your ideals of abundance?

When we are creatively manifesting and get caught in snags, we can utilize balancing actions to reconnect with an abundant source. If we feel lonely, we reach out to others. If we feel broke, we name all that we have, and then we give something away. If someone is cruel to us, we are kind to ourselves, then kind to others. These actions remind us that we have the ability to shape and change our world from a place of abundance. We can invoke balance in this way.

This Full Moon could also be bringing up, very clearly, what it is that must leave your life. In order to move on, we must honor completion. Something ending is a testament to the dedication that you cultivated continuously, whether the process was especially tender or heartbreakingly hard. Acknowledging a conclusion—whether it is an overripe rotting, or something simply ready to come to an organic finish like putting a favorite book back on the shelf after you've read it— describes a mature awareness. It is a gift to feel full and it is a blessing to follow the calling to begin again. Honor wherever you are in your process under this bright Moon of balance.

It’s all you, darling one. You are the one. The one you have been waiting for. You are the best thing that has ever happened to you. You become this as much as you let it. May you be brave enough to let go where you must. May you be brave enough to ask for what it is that you want. May you be brave enough to move forward with grace, courage, and the flicker of a steady flame.

Say please and say thank you.

Suggested Affirmation: “I am the one I have been waiting for. It is safe for me to operate from a place of abundance. My abundance vibrates from the inside out.”

— Excerpt is from Many Moons. Buy your copy here.

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