Moonlight

There is the kind of light that makes me reflexively bring my hand to my eyes and temporarily blinds me. It’s the light of December snow on a surprisingly sunny day or the sharp edge of a kitchen knife blade held up to the fluorescent kitchen light as I decide where to make the first cut. This light, to me, is always masculine. It is the light of the sun that penetrates and probes places that I’ve kept hidden from others, sometimes even from myself. Light that expects me to reveal what I’ve chosen not to. Yet there also exists the darkness that pulls me down in billowy waves—comforting and familiar-- yet in many ways terrifying.

When I’ve tried to ask others about the darkness, I’ve made the mistake of doing so in the light. There have been times when I’ve turned to strangers seated next to me on park benches or on airplanes. Their anonymity, or perhaps my own, giving me the courage to speak of the darkness and my apparent ease there. Always, there is a moment of recognition before a slight hesitation. Then a reckoning and I’m left to contemplate the darkness alone. Understanding that she and I are not to speak of such things in the light. I’m comforted, somehow, knowing that she knows, though she may have forgotten, and now she knows that I know, too.

I believe my grandmothers knew. The long line of women who came before me. Although I speak of the ones who share my DNA, whose blood pulses through my veins, there are also the bold women of history who I choose to claim as my own. The ones who upset the patriarchy and who chose the path that was choked off by roots and vines, who at first stepped gingerly over the obstacles along the way, pulling up their long white skirts so they did not trip over what was natural and what was manmade until the smoke from distant fires made them take to the wind because it was much easier to fly. Their silhouettes black against a full, blood moon,

These grandmothers instinctively knew to plant to a waning moon when the earth’s gravitational pull decreases and roots grow deep into the dark soil. Their fingers working adeptly, in time, as they pruned to the waxing moon. The petals they clipped appearing almost iridescent, falling gently to the ground. If I close my eyes tightly, I can see their faces reflected in the buckets of moon water they collected not understanding why they felt the wild call to do so, but doing it nonetheless because it felt right in their soul.

In their gardens, my grandmothers grew rosemary, sage, lavender, sometimes collards and kale. They knew the plants that could heal and the ones, if mixed with food or tea, could bring a grown man to his knees calling for his mother or at least keep him from straying like an alley cat in the dark of night looking for something new on which to pounce. When my grandmothers chose this kind of magick, the men in their lives finally understood the way of Lilith. The power in the feminine. The creator and the destroyer as one. The true Divine.

But the world of men has always been a necessary evil, perhaps this is the hell the sacred books spoke of? My grandmothers knew suffering, so they reached for each other’s hands in the darkness and pressed palm to palm as they intertwined fingers pushing babies into the cold, hard light, some of them male. Or they discovered pleasure from each other in ways that the men could not explain or call forth. They said, “My Sister, My Love” un-ironically, feeling no need to explain to those who would never understand.

In their own ways they called to the four corners and cast a circle of protection for themselves and for the daughters, whose names they knew and the ones who were to come, whose names they would never know. Daughters they would love no matter what, even when time and space distanced them.

To the North, they asked for guidance from all that flowered and grew. To the East, they asked for protection from every winged creature that also knew how to fly, and also those who crawled upon the earth on their legs or bellies. The names of the stones and the crystals held the energy of the southern gate, and they asked for that, too. And when they turned to the west, where the spirits of the ancestors rested upon the water, they listened because the ancestors knew the way.

Even now as I cast my own circle on the darkest night of the year, I know that I am not alone. In the shadows are those who came before me, women who felt no need to call it magick because they themselves were the magick, and there’s no need to name that which you already are.

But unlike them, there’s no need for me to sew my secrets into quilts to cover a cold winter’s bed, each remnant of fabric a story or to quietly pass my secrets to a daughter standing at my elbow as I pour ingredients into a bowl, performing my own kind of alchemy.

Instead, I can claim the moon for myself and stand fiercely before her, my body finally my own to do with it what I please. Although it may tilt toward the sun, it is not masculine energy where I gather my strength.

I am a daughter of the moon, and a granddaughter of those who forged a way in the darkness with only a flicker of hope alive in their chest.