The Journey of Ethel Me' - July

First the storytelling/trancey part. It was the story of the birth of the moon God, Nanna. There was this fascinating shadow-puppet theater thing using pine cones and leaves and various fabrics as people and places. No written description could do it justice.

After trance we were split into "elemental Moon tribes": 4 groups according to the elemental association of our moon sign. It was SO FRICKIN' COOL! My Sun sign is Taurus, but I've never felt fully comfortable with the idea of myself as an Earth sign; something just didn't gel. My Moon sign is Libra. So I got into a group with other Air Moon people, and...yes! Yes, that's it! So much about what we do in our day-to-day lives corresponds exactly with the traditional traits of these air signs. If I look back at the end of my life I'll see how very Taurean it was, but because I'm in the daily life the Moon sign affects, learning about it had truly profound impact on me.

After lunch came affinity group realignments, a long and complicated process I don't feel equal to explaining. But most everyone found a place they belong. So, alas, woosh is no longer one of my fellow affiners, but I have a keen new group now, which includes the woman who is exactly like my mom's best friend - if my mom's best friend were an uninhibited Witch instead of a repressed Catholic.

We studied the 4 levels of reality: physical (empirical fact), psychological (our feelings and reactions to empirical fact), mythic (in which we retell the story of physical reality as though our psychological impressions were empirical fact), and essential (the fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world that lead us to tell the stories we do). We each took a court card from the suit that represents our Moon element and went through a tremendous exercise where we went through the 4 levels using the card. We moved from the images on the card, to the emotions the card brought up for us, to what we thought the story of the card (or ourselves) was as it related to our interactions with community, to the underlying essence of that story. I must say I was truly startled by the truth I came up with. One of the teachers suggested that there are, at the core, only 5 core emotions, and I fully expected mine to be anger or fear. It turned out to be love. Huh. Who knew?

We each put our essential truth on a "moon" (round piece of white construction paper) and hung them around our necks. We moved into a spiral dance, where we could see everyone's truths about community. We raised energy and sent these truths as a spell into the Multiverse.

And then I took what remained of my homemade honey-peach-mango sorbet (thank you, leorathesane!) and went home. The end.