Mysteries Of The Moon

It was night of February 20, 2008. I was out watching the total eclipse of the full moon. The sky was enormous. There were no clouds. When the moon came up, it was a breathtaking milky-gold ball that lit up the horizon. As it rose and became white, the eclipse shadow began taking over. I kept watching it as the shadow grew and even tried to take some pictures of it. The pictures did it no justice. It is one of those things I will just have to remember.

I have been enchanted and awed by the moon as long as I can remember. Watching her cycles wax and wane has taught me more about life than just about anything else. She has been the most consistent and dependable thing in my life. I know she is out there when it is cloudy, her path misses my view, or when she is covered by the shadow of an eclipse.

When my son was small and one of us would go away, I used to tell him that we were never far away from each other because we could both see the moon. That made it much easier to be apart. It would have been unbearable if the moon had not been there for both of us. Even though my son is now an adult and on another continent, I still use my reference point to be certain of our connection.

Once an amazing thing happened. While watching the moon one night I had what I would call a sacred experience. I was on a mountain in Colorado camping out under the stars when a full moon rose in the sky. The light was so bright I could see as if it was daytime. I was laying in my sleeping bag watching the sky in wonder when, suddenly, I had the experience of not being separate. It was as if I was a part of the mountain, the sky, the moon—I was everything. From that moment, my spiritual life has filled and changed my perception of life.

I was hungry for lunar knowledge. I found the symbolic and spiritual connections fascinating. I read folk stories, fairy tales, poetry, novels, magazines, astrology, psychology and any spiritual books I could get my hands on.

I found out that many ancient cultures worshiped the moon more than the sun. Some called all deities the “moon”. To the Greeks, menos meant both “moon” and “power.” To the Romans, the morality of the Moon-goddess was superior to that of the Sun god. In many cultures, the Moon-goddess and the Creatress were one and the same. The Moon-goddess was thought to create time, with all its cycles of creation, growth, decline, and destruction, which is why ancient calendars were based on phases of the moon.

Because the Moon-goddess was threefold, the Destroyer as well as the Creator, she was the devourer of the dead as well as the giver of life. The Greeks located the home of the blessed dead in the moon. Most important for its association with birth, the moon was supposed to be the receptacle of menstrual blood by which each mother formed the life of her child.

Few religious symbols occurred in so many diverse contexts as symbols of the moon. Despite all the church’s condemnations, rural folk continued to trust the Moon-mother in all their most important activities. To them, the moon governed women’s sexuality, birth, death, and magic. (Walker)

As I gathered information, my own beliefs began to take shape and I was swept away with inspiration. With the new insights, I began to feel my power in a new and exciting way. The moon began to signify the feminine to me. She became a link to my mother, and her mother and her mother. I remembered when I became a mother and felt her presence right beside me, holding me and rocking me back and forth, back and forth.

I was beginning to understand the moon's energies about life and death. When my mother died, I initially felt as if I had lost all connection to everything. It was night when I got the word, and all I could do was go outside with my dog and sit on the ground under a huge tree and weep. Just as I was being submerged in agonizing despair, I looked up and the moon was peeking over a cloud at me. I remembered in that instant my connection to everything, including to my mother, now on the other side. Knowing I was part of everything, even death would ever take her away. My mother died thirty-one years ago this month. It seems like yesterday and forever. Tomorrow is my son’s birthday. It seems like he has been with me always.

As the eclipse completely obscured the moon, I took deep breaths and basked in the gratitude of her presence, her secrets, her power and the mysteries that she has offered me. She has shown me about the cycles of birth, life and death in many it's many forms and ways. She has helped me connect with spirituality. Because of her and what she has come to represent to me, she has enriched my life with a wondrous journey. I celebrate the blessings of the moon as she travels through the sky, holding her secrets for me to discover.

LIFE PATHS

I was born into music. Life offers us many paths, and for me, music has been a constant presence, a source of pain and joy, and a beacon for my inner life. It has meant various things to me at different times. At first it was so much a part of my world, I didn’t even question and couldn’t tell where I began and it ended. As I was growing up, there was a confusing swirl with my mother and music. I wonder now if the opportunities she provided to develop my talents were really about her unlived dreams.



My mother was a natural, talented musician who played organ at church for over 30 years before her untimely death. A guilt-ridden sense of doing penance for some deep-seated sadness permeated her music. She dutifully played without missing one Sunday service in all those years. She also taught piano lessons to any child in our small mid-west town who expressed an interest. When I wasn’t climbing a tree to listen to the music of the rustling leaves in the wind, I used to hide under a table in the hall and listen to her teaching.

I started playing piano at age 4 and violin at 7. Every Saturday we would make a 60-mile drive to take lessons. The weekly excursion gave me the idea that music was my life ticket out of town. That vision grew as the years passed and gave me a forward-looking focus to my life. I never looked back.

I didn’t really know how I felt about music back then. I actually gave no thought about what it meant. Studying the basic instrumental techniques when I first started was tedious dull work, like all new students experience. With my natural enthusiasm to learn, having the discipline to practice was not a problem

Learning the basics was, for me, not exactly music. It was similar to learning to walk, read or learn a new language. In the early stages there was no magic, beauty, or transcendence. It was a necessary rite of passage, which would later give me the tools to step into music and let it take me away.

By the time I was fourteen I started giving piano lessons. This was really fun and I totally enjoyed my students’ progress and watching them becoming ignited with the love of playing music. I continued teaching piano for 15 years. The last year I taught, I had forty students, ten of them adults. At that time, I had become quite fascinated with the effect music had on the heart and soul. I decided to give a workshop for my adult students to share this with them.

They were all much older than me and, as I look back on it, it gives me a great appreciation and compassion for my courage as a very young and naïve adult. I talked passionately about music and the soul and laid myself totally open to my budding beliefs. When I asked the question, “Where does the music come from?” and all ten responded, “the piano”, I spent the rest of the time trying to impart “the real truth” of my convictions.

The following week all ten students dropped out. I was devastated! I knew deep down what I had said was incredibly valuable and true. Had they stayed with the process, I knew it would have taken them to a new level in their lives. I still remember the sadness their leaving provoked in me.

Unbelievably, two weeks later, all the students returned. Their playing had improved tremendously. What was more profound though, was how they had integrated parts of my convictions into their lives. This inner growth had deeply changed their lives and given them a voice. Their souls were singing through the piano with joy.

I got a degree in violin and piano performance and became a professional musician. I practiced many hours a day. The isolation heightened my shyness and tendency toward depression. I was not happy. I played in orchestras and freelanced with other musicians who were underpaid, unappreciated and unhappy. Being paid to play music was no longer play but work. Music was no longer uplifting and I felt as if I was losing my life force.

The familiar knowing of needing to let go that I had experienced many times in my life emerged. I had to let go of making my living with music. Once I made the leap, I gradually began to remember the joy of music, my passion for it and how it fed my soul. I yearned to play with people who loved music as much as I did and who played for the sheer joy of the experience. This path led me to chamber music. I was enchanted with all of the different combination of instrumentation and the wealth of compositions that had been written.

During this time a pathway opened up and music became my own. More importantly, music took me over and made me hers. I do not remember the exact moment when I became the music and began to express myself and my relationship to everything in the Universe through this seamless collaboration.

Rediscovering earlier awareness about the connection between music and my inner life coincided with opportunities to improvise with other musicians. This was a totally new way of relating to music, quite different from my classical training. This expansion from form to formlessness began to help me conceptualize the thread between music and psychology.

Psychology was a tremendously exciting path. I loved becoming more familiar with my inner life. I took classes in psychology, immersed myself in individual and group therapy, extensively read psychologists and their theories and eventually molded all of my deep-felt zeal into a new career. My process led me into a world that provoked many of the same experiences as music, but was bigger, deeper, wider and higher. I realized this was what I had been trying to convey to my piano students.

With psychology and music, my inner and outer worlds merged and became enlivened in ways I couldn’t have even fathomed. I found that my creativity was rising to the surface and finding expression I didn’t know I had. This combination fed and nurtured me beyond my wildest imagination.
Then, one day I woke up and felt like a chrysalis about to break out of a cocoon. No part of my life seemed to fit anymore. The path I had been on had taken a sharp turn and then divided. It seemed impossible to find my bearings. My soul was opening my awareness to something new.

My immediate inner response was to drop into an empty void so deep that psychology and music disappeared altogether. I plunged in the anguish of the dark night of the soul. Music and psychology had been so alive and active. This place was totally still and dark. There was no light to guide me. All I could do was sit in the quiet and wait. My soul was taking a new direction and I had to wait to see where I was going.

In the waiting, I became aware of the importance of silence. In music, the space in between was equally as important as the notes. In the inner psyche, the places that seem void of everything are just as vital as the ones filled with noisy experiences and frenzied feelings. I could not escape the depth of this emptiness. My soul had a lesson for me. All I could do was wait and let it emerge.

After what seemed like an eternity, I began to sense a new dimension emerging that was bigger than music and psychology together. The world that my soul began to show me was metaphysical. It began to connect all of me together. The inner work I had done on myself and all of the ways music had guided me throughout my life began to come into focus, with the backdrop of something greater. My soul had broken out of its old form and was showing me a deeper, spiritual dimension of my life. This outgrowth from music to psychology to my spiritual self seemed like the most natural thing in the world. All tension lifted and I experience inner peace for the first time.

Psychology is the study of the soul. The next step in looking at the personal and interpersonal aspects of my life is transpersonal. I believe the soul offers life lessons through giving situations that require both inward and outward tension. Working these lessons out, no matter how many mistakes or successes, moves my soul forward to the next level or lesson. At some point, a transpersonal vantage point comes into view. This gives my soul its connection with the spiritual aspects of life.

Music and psychology, as they have operated in my life, have given me many lessons and taken me down many paths of learning. By integrating them into the transpersonal, I am now much more aligned with my soul. I am now connected with myself, others and something much greater.

Recently I have dusted off my violin case, put on new strings and carefully place chosen notes into the world. It seems so delicate and fragile, yet strong and powerful at the same time. My inner life resonates with the ‘new’ through my every moment of my life. Everyday my soul gives me another piece of this metaphysical puzzle in ways I understand on a deep level, but have no words to express. I have entered the next phase of my life. I know psychology and music are my foundation and now I am learning to fly low and have a strong place to land.

I was born into music. Music has patiently accompanied my soul. I am blessed to have come into this life with the gifts and willingness to find myself over and over again. From where I am now, there is nothing to do but follow the ancients in their pursuit of the Music of the Spheres.