Aries New Moon: Redefining Adventure
April 2016
Recently I had someone describe me as adventurous. I honestly had never used the word adventurous as a way of describing myself, in fact had often thought of the word as pedestrian, too often used, and co-opted.
As I am currently spending a season in Moab, Utah the word adventure is reflected all around me through a town whose tourist business thrives on outfitting people to move down rivers, scale arches, and hike mountains.
It occurred to me that on this day of the New Moon in Aries, I might reinvent the word adventure for myself, and remember that adventure at its root includes definitions like these: an exciting and remarkable experience, to take a chance and to risk the loss of…
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
--Mary Oliver from Blackwater Woods
Aries offers us a beginning point of reference for this next moon cycle. It might be a time to consider what our own version of adventure looks like. Adventure can show up anywhere, not just in some distant country or place. When do we recognize the places in our lives where we take risks? When have we been proud of ourselves for being strong? What are we willing to take a chances on? Where can we pat ourselves on the back with the reflection of a job well done. Are we facing our fears?
In Frank Herbert's Dune, a book where the fictional planet feels and looks very much like the current piece of earth I live on, there is a mantra about fear:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Tonight I've decided to greet the new moon with courage, turn the inner eye on my own path and face the new month with this newly defined sense of adventure.