Hello hello!
This week for my Magicians series, I sat down with Stephanie Foley of Moonfeather Hollow, a mythological ecosystem built around lunar and seasonal rhythms, spiritual practice, and creative living.
Stephanie writes about so many things that spark my fancy at Seasons and Stars here on Substack. This episode came into being because I posted something about the magic of sevens and she sent me an amazing document she put together called The Spiral of Sevens, mapping sevenfold patterns across mythology, music, sacred geometry, and dozens of other things. She’s truly a brilliant and engaging soul, and I think you’re going to love this conversation.
Before we get into the episode, a quick note: My Ecosomatic Astrology 101 course is now officially open for registration! It begins this fall equinox, six Tuesdays on Zoom running September 22 through October 27. All calls will be recorded if you can’t make it live.
This is the first 101/Basics course I’ve taught, and I’m super excited to bring foundational knowledge of astrology (significations of signs, planets, houses, aspects, and everything you need to read charts) through an embodied, ecological lens. I believe that we all carry inside us the ancient wisdom of our interconnection between body, earth, and sky, and my hope with this course is to reveal paths to an inner awareness. Expect somatic practices, breathwork, movement, and creativity woven into each transmissions- this isn’t just a sit-and-stare at your computer kind of class!
🎧 Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:
On finding each other through the spiral
Stephanie and I connected on Substack before we ever spoke, recognizing a kindred territory in each other’s work from different angles:
“When I found you, I felt relief and gratitude because you had already created some body of work that I had been wanting to create, and I felt like, ‘Oh, good, that part’s done already.’”
On the spiritual importance of seven and eight
This became the spine of the whole conversation, the idea that seven is the process and eight is the structure that holds it:
“The eight is the inclusive, and the seven is the in between... The things keep happening in the sevens, but the systems are eight. It’s like the seven is the living, being, doing, and the eight is the structure that holds it.”
(Stephanie also brought up this old Friends episode about another important set of 7, which made me laugh out loud…)
On grief and the gold buried in the cycle
We talked about returning to old griefs from a new vantage point as the cycle turns:
“When you come back to the anniversary of a grief thing, a sad thing, a certain amount of... it’s not just time. It’s experience, exposure, perspective, perception. Other content has flown through the cycle to where now you are experiencing a grief from a new place.”
On building a life around the seven planetary days
Stephanie described the scaffolding she built for herself out of the seven days of the week, each one carrying its own planetary tenant- a practice that I’ve also been using over the past couple of years:
“I have this system now where a well-balanced life is distributed across these seven days... If it’s Thursday, well, that’s a day of expansion and expression, a day named for Jupiter. And so I wake up on a Thursday morning and I say, ‘Portals of expansion are opening today. Growth abounds.’”
On Moon Feather Hollow as an imaginal sanctuary
Stephanie’s business partner lives in a place called Moon Hollow, she lives near what translates to Valley of the Moon, and Moonfeather Hollow was born from there. She described the whole point of it:
“Names and labels are great until they limit you... We can instead go back to a ancestral memory or a collective unconscious memory of being a fairy with wings who can be in the woods, or a gnome, or just a mythical creature of expansive childhood nostalgia, we tap into that sense of inner wisdom, play, joy, creativity.”
On healing the masculine wound
One of the more tender turns in the conversation was about the fear of shedding, and how it shows up differently across genders:
“There’s this underlying belief within a lot of male-bodied people that if you let yourself die a little bit you will fully die and will never regenerate... I think we’re going to need to have a great big masculine healing for the masculine in all of us, because it’s been through a lot.”
On moving toward synarchy
We chatted about how we don’t see the next era as a return to matriarchy so much as something new entirely:
“I really do see the next age, the Age of Aquarius and this next era that we’re coming into as an age of synarchy, more than matriarchy or patriarchy... There is an actual union that’s needing to happen.”
On asynchronous voice and untethering from performance
Stephanie has been building tools inside Moon Feather Hollow around voice notes instead of live calls, and she connected it back to Mercury:
“If I’m feeling like I can talk, I can leave a message out there in the ether. And then there’s this magical thing that happens where time passes, experience passes, someone else listens to that message, responds to it, has a perspective shift... There’s less performative energy.”
On the Jupiter thread running through the whole conversation
Near the end we discovered we share the same Jupiter placement, in Gate 34, the Sagittarius gate of Power:
“That’s where I’m saying, like, you can ask me what I do, and I can give you all these different titles that have meaning... but the way that I do that is up to them, and it’s based on what they need, because my experience is a 49, which is the well of depth. I’m a synthesizer.”
🎧 Tune in to our full conversation in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:
About Stephanie Foley
Stephanie is a Creative Alchemist with one foot in the forest and one in the stars, a companion to souls emerging like butterflies and remembering their magic. As a Cosmic Cartographer, she maps the interplay between imagination, nature, and universal cycles, guiding people to align purpose with presence and expand into their full expression.
A lifelong collaborapreneur, she blends artistry, entrepreneurship, and co-creation as pathways to collective magic, and as an Enchanted Muse and co-author of books and courses, she brings people together around lunar rhythm, archetypal psychology, and transformation. Rooted in both science and spirit, she draws from a background in transpersonal development and shamanism to bridge the mystical and the practical.
You can find Stephanie at moonfeatherhollow.com, on Substack at Seasons and Stars, and on YouTube at Moonfeather Hollow.
About Alison of Living the Spiral
Alison is an ecosomatic astrologer, Human Design guide, breathwork practitioner, and creative sovereignty coach based in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives under the name Hearth & Spiral, where she blends astrology, Human Design, somatic practice, and myth into a path back to the body and the land.
She hosts Living the Spiral as both a podcast and a Substack publication, where she’s currently walking through all 64 Human Design gates as the Sun moves through them across the solar year. She co-created ELA Map with her partner Jackson, an astrocartography and Human Design cartography platform, and works as a consultant and practitioner there. She also offers one on one coaching through her Tending the Flame container.
Alison draws on Celtic seasonal traditions, the I’Ching, and goddess mythology, with a longstanding devotion to Inanna’s descent. You can find her writing at Living the Spiral on Substack, follow her on Instagram at @hearthandspiral.
Her fall Ecosomatic Astrology course is open for registration, six Tuesdays on Zoom running September 22 through October 27.
Interested in being interviewed on Living the Spiral: Magicians? Send me a DM!
