If you are a sensitive (normal, human) soul like me, you might be looking out at the world and wondering, what is it all for?

All this suffering, all this pain, all this productivity despite the mounting horrors?

The only thing that might be worth it is love; specifically, our experiences of love.

Not just romantic, familial or even friend love - but love for our fellow human, love for the sky, the air, love for the sun, the water, the land. Love for all animals, the birds, the trees, the flowers and bees. Love for spirit and soul and connection to something greater than our smaller sense of self.

Love for life – that we get to experience this life at all.

As more and more of us wake up every day to the theater put on by the powers that be, we must fight against their stories of inevitability.

The more of us that see that the emperor wears no clothes, the background becomes the foreground; the systems become the stars.

We must replace their visions of dystopia with clear visions of our own.

Their global humiliation ritual is not our destiny.

We can create a more loving world.

Right now, we can all afford to both give and receive more love.

And I think that, in daily life, we are. Many of us are trying to mend the frayed social fabric, more of us learning to “neighbor” one another all the time.

We do not need permission to take small actions that increase the amount of love available in the air.

Our practice for this lunation is centered on love – again all kinds of love – both given and received. It is also an experience of beauty and fantasy.

If we are to dream up better things, we have to set aside time to dream properly.

This new moon can show us the way.

Until next time,

Jess

you can get the full video experience in the Lunar Library or audio-only meditation in the shop

The Basket

“It is the most beneficial configuration of the century and its interplanetary partnership will work for the best in a splendid relaunch of civilization. It contains a harmonious relationship between primordial opposites. The coming together of the external and the internal, the rational and the spiritual, the mind and soul. Human beings surpassing themselves while experiencing themselves at a higher level.

…

The beginnings of a new world civilization, the beginnings of which appeared around the year 2000 and in full flight here (July 2026).

The entry into the second quarter of the century bears the stamp of the achievement of a new age of humanity.”

Andre Barbault, Planetary Cycles

“This is a planetary experience”

- Kaypacha

“I cannot picture a ‘post-neoliberal society rooted in fairness.’ But tell me that I could wake up each day and hear birds outside my window again, and that I can cycle safely to work on clearly-marked bike lanes. Tell me about a world where the rise of job-shares and redistributed wealth means that I only have to work 20 hours a week and finally have the time to make doctor’s appointments, check up on my friends and neighbours, read books and get involved in local issues. Tell me that I won’t worry about who made my clothes or prepared my food, because supply chains are more local now, and regulations on environmental and human rights standards have been implemented to make sure nobody is being exploited behind the scenes.”

- Cass Hebron, The Green Fix

“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.”

—James Hillman

“We numb our senses from morning till night - whether it’s with noise or loud music or light at night. So nobody sees the beauty. And if we’ve lost the feeling of the beauty of the world, then we are looking for substitutes…”

- James Hillman

“Words themselves carry spirit, energy, and weight. How you speak to others and yourself has ripple effects that reach farther and deeper under the surface than we realize.

The Goddess speaks through: conversation, storytelling, poetry, songs, myths, letters.

It’s more than just how you communicate or exchange info, but how life is communicating through everything going on around you: conversation overheard in a café or the thing your child says without realizing its importance.”

-Leah Vandervelt

“You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.” – Terence McKenna

It's in the imagination

With which you perceive

This world,

And the gestures

With which you honor it.

- Mary Oliver, The Swan

“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

— Vincent van Gogh

"The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what's coming; never. That's the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it's hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you'll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you'd have missed it if you'd given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone."

- Allen Wheelis

"We do not find our own center. It finds us. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking."

- Richard Rohr

“What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

- Alain de Botton

Don't go off sightseeing.

The real journey is right here.

The great excursion starts

from exactly where you are.

You are the world.

You have everything you need.

You are the secret.

You are the wide opened.

Don't look for the remedy for your troubles

outside yourself.

You are the medicine.

You are the cure for your own sorrow.

- Jalaluddin Rumi

Avoid small talk. Embrace conversation.

Buy a plant, water it. Make your bed. Make

someone else's bed. Have a smart mouth,

and quick wit. Run. Make art. Create.

Swim in the ocean. Swim in the rain. Take

chances. Ask questions. Make mistakes.

Learn. Know your worth. Love fiercely.

Forgive quickly. Let go of what doesn't

make you happy.

- Paulo Coelho de Souza

“Loving-kindness, or metta, as it in called in the Pali language, is unconditional, inclusive love, a love with wisdom. It has no conditions; it does not depend on whether one “deserves” it or not; it is not restricted to friends and family; it extends out from personal categories to include all living beings. There are no expectations of anything in return. This is the ideal, pure love, which everyone has in potential. We begin with loving ourselves, for unless we have a measure of this unconditional love and acceptance for ourselves, it is difficult to extend it to others. Then we include others who are special to us, and, ultimately, all living things. Gradually, both the visualization and the meditation phrases blend into the actual experience, the feeling of loving kindness.

This is a meditation of care, concern, tenderness, loving kindness, friendship–a feeling of warmth for oneself and others. The practice is the softening of the mind and heart, an opening to deeper and deeper levels of the feeling of kindness, of pure love. Loving kindness is without any desire to possess another. It is not a sentimental feeling of goodwill, not an obligation, but comes from a selfless place. It does not depend on relationships, on how the other person feels about us. The process is first one of softening, breaking down barriers that we feel inwardly toward ourselves, and then those that we feel toward others.”

– The Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society

“For too long … scientists and citizens on the street have focused on the dark side of human nature, on our propensity for selfishness and tribalism and mendacity and cruelty and violence, as if this were a natural or normal or primary state of affairs,” he says. “And yet, I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves, because, equally, we are capable of love and friendship and teaching and cooperation and all these other wonderful things. And, in fact, I would argue those qualities are more powerful than the bad qualities and, therefore, in some ways, much more important.”

- Nicholas Christakis, Sociologist and Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. [...]

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”

--Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, 'Being here is so much,' and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. The more lonely side of being here is our separation in the world. When you live in a body, you are separate from every other object and person. Many of our attempts to pray, to love and to create are secret attempts at transfiguring that separation in order to build bridges outwards so that others can reach us and we can reach them."

-John o'Donohue