"To Know the Dark, Go Dark": A sing-along for the New Moon in Cancer
Hey friends,
The moon is now waxing its way toward fullness, but the sky is still so very nice and dark. I just got back from 4 days 3 nights in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, camping in a mesh tent with the full view of the Milky Way, made all the more stunning by the darkness of the Cancer New Moon.
Nestled in the tent with my family, a cozy home-away-from-home in the midst of the vast wilderness, was a perfect way to spend the time when the sun was meeting the moon in the nurturing sign of Cancer.
One evening as we sat fireside, my daughter Tala pointed out all of the ‘shooting stars’ that she could see slowly moving across the black night sky. These ‘stars’, of course, were weather satellites, the International Space Station, Elon Musk/SpaceX’s Starlink, and other man-made objects circling the earth. Tala, who’s name means “star” in Tagalog, refused to accept this fact, even when we told her that it was these same satellites that helped her do video calls with her papa in New York and her great-grandma in Oregon. “They’re shooting stars, mama”. Ok, you can be right, little one.
Fixed Stars, Wandering Stars & Space-Age Satellites
The prefix “-astro”, from the Greek “aster” or “astron” (plural) means star, but perhaps more accurately "celestial body”, as the Greeks and other ancient people divided the stars into two categories: fixed stars and wandering stars: today’s planets. If we can time travel back in our minds to these early days of astrology and astronomy, all the shiny dots in the night sky were stars of one kind or another.
If today’s satellites are asters too, another type of rapidly wandering star, it makes me wonder what kind of inherent cosmology my child is inheriting, versus the one that I grew up with, let alone my parents, grandparents, and ancestors knew in their lifetimes.
The Earth-orbiting asters of our time, the amalgamated pieces of aluminum, titanium and rare gems that we humans have launched into space are largely for the purpose of connecting us with one another. Video calls, GPS, high-speed internet- all the stuff of sci-fi for Tala’s great grandmother - are our day-to-day norm, the stars that are embedded into the fabric of our lives in the ways that wandering and fixed stars were embedded into the fabric of our ancestors daily realities.
After 4 days out of service in the wild, we were still on a dirt road next to a rushing river when the urgent ping! ping! ping! of unread texts, emails, What’s App, Discord, Facebook and Instagram messages started to overwhelm my phone. Anxiety shot through the roof. I was left to wonder if grown-up Tala will ever experience a long weekend out of connection with the entire planet… maybe not?
When I first went to Burning Man in 2010, there was definitely no service out at Black Rock City, but now as I the season of the festival approaches I know I’ll be seeing art cars and furry-fashion posted across the web in real time. On a backpacking trip deep into the Gila Wilderness in Southern New Mexico a couple years ago, I sat in a hot spring and a few other hikers pointed out that Starlink would soon let us check our Twitter Feeds while soaking hundreds of miles from civilization.
To know the dark, go dark: a sing-along somatic practice
The somatic practice for today (see the video below) is a sing-along to a song that I came to mind as I sat in the woods while my daughter slept in the car and my partner went off on a little fly-fishing adventure upstream.
Singing is such a powerful practice to get into your body, to connect with your breath, to connect with something larger beyond yourself. I absolutely love to sing, for the pure feeling of doing it - but most of my life I’ve relegated singing to the shower, the car, or deep in the woods where no one could hear me. I’m still the most comfortable singing to the trees, but over the past few years, I’ve started singing wherever and whenever I can, finding true healing power in making sounds with my voice, even if it doesn’t sound perfect.
A few months ago, I decided to go deeper, and I’ve been engaged in a facilitator training for a series of singing and vocalization practices called the Vocal Resonance Method. As of this week, I’m now officially certified as a Vocal Resonance Teacher & Facilitator, and I look forward to starting offering more practices I’ve been learning to help get in touch with your voice, your breath, and your body! But for now, a simple song :)
It seems like it’s going to be harder and harder to truly go dark … so this song, based on a poem by Wendell Barry, is a reminder that the dark, too, blooms and sings.
I invite you to get comfy, stretch out, and sing along with me! It’s a lovely song to collect into your song-basket, and is truly fun to sing. Here are the lyrics (most of which I remembered out there deep in the woods :D)
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Stars Like Us
Up in the daylight in the alpine mountains as I sang out to the chipmunks and the clouds, I looked out and saw a field of asters- my Virgoan birth flower, whose petals radiate out like star shine. We are always surrounded by stars, enraptured and enamored by the radiant notion of stars.
Our Home, our place on this beautiful planet Earth, has always been surrounded by stars, has always made meaning made by looking at stars. The ever-present ability to connect with people on all sides the planet is a fascinating development. When I’m at my most optimistic, this quest for connection and lack of communicative boundaries seems like the most fitting thing for us humans to be doing, maybe even the thing that will ultimately save us all.
Maybe once we can sort the proverbial wheat from the chaff, parse out the dopamine-fueled technological addiction from the practical and useful tools that our satellites and phones and computers are, we’ll be able to see that the whole world is our Home, and that Home is worth working together to love and care for. That’s my starry-eyed hope, anyway. And a big part of getting there, to that beautiful star-linked utopia, is first to go in the dark, to know the dark, without carrying a light. To know that without all the connection and distraction, we’re still ok, still more than ok, still whole. So that when we come in touch with to the beautiful and expanding network that we’re a part of, we’ll know that we belong. That we, doing our part in it, make that network itself whole.
That if we can be Home with ourselves and Home with the Earth, we can also be Home with others, and Home with the entirety of the Universe.
Radiating out all the love to you this week. This Saturday, July 22nd, our wandering star Venus will go retrograde in Leo, entering a new cycle where she goes dark herself for a while before meeting up with the sun and emerging anew as a morning star.
With that in mind, take this with you for next months of summer:
To know dark, go dark.
Come home to yourself.
Come home to your values.
Come home to your deepest, most personal sense of beauty, love and connection.
This time won’t last forever.
Soon you will emerge anew, and radiate your light. But for this brief cycle, go dark. Know the dark.
Thanks for reading, sharing, and subscribing! xoxxo!