Nox Amicus

At 12:11pm on July 24th, the Moon was New again. While I realize this is probably the latest in a cycle I’ve posted an intention, I have lived with this since before the Moon was New.

In the last cycle I had been focused on Waiting, realizing that I had a propensity to wait for some kind of inspired alignment before taking action on things; I acknowledged that it’s always time and I’m always here, and in doing so I realized that sometimes we can just act out of instinct rather than “waiting for a moment that just don’t come”.

The song from last cycle, “It’s All I Can Do” by The Cars, contains the chorus “It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you.” That became the mantra for the cycle. It became less philosophical and much more practical, and in those moments, the concept of Dualism for this cycle was born.

I have always tried to keep these posts universal – referring to events or people in my life in the abstract, because it was thoughts and feelings I’d been trying to comment on and learn from. But I cannot ignore the fact that I spent most of July in a hospital bed recovering from complications from gallbladder surgery.

Until July 8, the most complicated medical procedures I’d had were dental implants. I’d never spent a night in a hospital, never had an IV drip, never had surgery – none of it. But when they put me on the bed in the emergency room, I knew this was a different game – one I had no control over. I realized then that I was a slab of meat and the hospital and staff were there to coalesce me back into a whole – but I wasn’t there.

In the mid-1600s, René Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy where he described one aspect of Dualism as the mind being distinct from the body. I felt this during those days in the hospital. I was conscious – though addled with fever – and aware of everything, but this was very separate from my physical self that I simply couldn’t relate to. It was going through things that my rational brain could understand, but not comprehend.

The line was decidedly clear one particularly hard day – I was kinda done. My body was tired, my mind was exhausted, I just didn’t know how much I had left in me. But I dug deep and gave my body a pep talk – I told it how proud I was of the way it was persevering, I told it that if we just kept going there really was an other side, and I told it I loved him. This was not dissimilar from comforting an inner child. My body stopped crying and grieving and began to calm, and we pushed on side by side. Not integrated, but together.

So the focus for the July new moon has been Dualism. By the time the New Moon arrived, I was already two thirds of the way through the hospital stay – I had been living through June’s cycle of impatience, but I had already recognized the Dualism I was living. Impatience was giving way to grace and cooperation – and that’s just a gentler way to move through life.

Lyrically, I can feel the shift too – this cycle’s song is again sung to myself, but instead of concentrating on the separation of mind and body, it celebrates their partnership.

“We’re on our way home.”