Why Tune To the Moon?

Intentional entrainment is empowering.

Every day, our nervous systems are entrained to countless overlapping rhythms. It’s easy to overlook the sources of periodic oscillations in our environment but their influences are deep and real. They influence our internal time keepers, like circadian and homeostatic rhythms (not to mention our dominant thought patterns), and set our expectations for future patterns. Participation in each unconscious repetition is a tacit agreement about what constitutes reality. Entrainment is seduction. Ultimately, you become what you agree to. Choosing to consciously attune to a naturally occurring rhythm, like Lunar Phases, is a way of consciously staking out reality.

The act of observing facilitates presence.

My primary reason, years ago, for developing this habit was to throw off the Tyranny of the Ticks. My day was eating me alive and I knew that, for me, what was missing was an intimacy with Time and a slower experience. For years, I’d found myself transfixed by the sight of the Moon, but I felt my overcrowded life couldn’t “justify” the time or energy cost of a new disciplined practice. I was entrained to a rigidly monochronic way of thinking. The beautiful thing about a good rhythm, though, is that (once you surrender to it) it will hold you. And the great thing about a devotional practice of any kind is that it will pay you back in dividends of joy and sacred inner space. After some months of sporadically remembering to make note of the Moon’s position and condition, to keep them in mind during the day and sometimes to go out and observe the evening outdoor happenings, Moon gazing started to draw me in. Ultimately, I found that making time to do it was imminently justifiable.

Broadening your temporal scope helps banish anxiety.

As I mapped what I knew of the Moon’s phase and location to the territory of my own experience, I began to cultivate a felt sense of the Moon’s phases and I could feel the capacity for that sense to refine and expand, in time—and it has. Instead of thinking exclusively in the ticks of minutes and hours, I had a more qualitative container for those ticks to exist in. The ticks of this day had the secret quality of the dark Moon, while the ticks of that day had a fuller, more public quality. The naming of things is very powerful in that way.

Anxiety tends to shorten your focus to near term events, goals and obligations, to the eventual exclusion of longer term desires if the anxiety continues unresolved. Following the Moon has given me a means to expand my temporal territory. Not in the sense of projecting and future-pacing (which I do plenty), but more of an expansion of the territory of my present moment. To be clear, it has taken (is taking) more than just attuning to the Moon to wrest those ticks from my fists. I still struggle to balance all the things and even to maintain a journaling habit at times, but living alongside the Moon has improved the quality of my life in unnamable ways. I’m not religious about it. It’s something I like to do as passively as possible, in fact (aside from the work of mapping out the Lunar Cycle ahead). I let it call me back if I fall off.

Direct Experience of the Sublime

Over my lifetime, the accumulated moments of having been suddenly stricken with awe by the sight of the Moon has grown an interior pocket of impenetrable reverence. A sacred container reserved for the Mystery. For me, that little pocket of reverent devotion and secret appreciation sequestered itself for decades, waiting for the rest of me to finally invite that space to expand.

A few nights ago, I was awakened by a distant pack of wild dogs yipping and howling at the Aquarian Full Moon. I went outside and sat a while, drinking in the sight of her, so full of light, as she absorbed their song and my gaze. I felt overwhelming gratitude for being called to witness, at 2:30 in the morning, the perfecting Fullness of that Moon.

The Moon connects me to the collective experience of humanity, the past and the future. She still holds all of that love and devotion bestowed on her over time by all manner of Earthly species and I receive some of that in her emanations. She contains what I transmit to her and reflects back to me in the language of resonance and memory and water. When things get hectic in my world and I get caught up in a frenetic pace, she’s still there, keeping time and waiting for me to reset my pulse to her rhythm again.

The Moon in her varied constancy offers a beautiful and comfortingly familiar pacemaker. Endlessly reliable and endlessly novel. Traversing the same sections of sky, again and again, she filters and transmits the light she gathers back to Earth in ways that never exactly repeat but always rhyme. She speaks poetry in real time and tells time as a poem.

The Moon can teach you timing: when to move, when to stay. The unfolding of her phases, as she moves through her ~29.5 day dance with the Sun, works as a template for other synodic cycles. This is one way the Moon acts as a gateway. Once she’s taught you her phases, you’ll naturally see them in other periodic cycles. If you’re a student of the planets or the economy or animal behavior or agriculture or Life, you probably already know this to be true.

The beauty part, though, is yours to unfold.