The Dark Moon is close and I love the stillness in the garden at night. The Sabian symbol for this new moon in Aquarius is
‘A child born out of an egg shell.’
We give birth to ourselves in the dark, filled with intentionality and potential. The egg shell has to break open, we cannot just incubate the smooth egg, the perfect enclosed notion. There is the child within breaking free of enclosure, risking the uunknown and coming into the world trembling and vulnerable. My rituals must take on a scary open trust and birthing process.
My friend Trish found a large dappled egg abandoned out on the hillside under a tall pine tree, some years ago. She brought it home and kept the egg warm in cotton wool, pillowed and sheltered from draughts. One evening when I was there, we heard the tick-tick noise of the tiny bird pecking out of the egg and within a few hours the gosling had emerged, sticky wet and spiky. The egg shell cracked open in jagged fragments. An Egyptian goose, very common in the Cape. She reared the goose and after four months he flew away, coming back twice to visit. We called him Spike and he is immortalized on video tape, his webbed print stamped into a terracotta plate that hangs on an outside wall.
One of the older folk traditions of South African is hand-painted ostrich eggs, great cream-coloured and porous egg shells painted in symmetrical or picturesque designs. It is a curious and sometimes kitsch tradition I like very much and I often stand looking at coloured and panoramic ostrich eggs when I am staying in the small villages of the Karoo. I have made an omelette for 15 people from the hefty yolk of one ostrich egg alone. The shells are dense and able to withstand the heat and harsh climate of the Karoo, often buried in warm sand.
So the Dark Moon is perfect time for an emergence of sorts. Letting go of defendedness and coming into the world new-born and naked and receptive, covered and shielded by the sympathetic dark. Dreaming of flight and soaring vision.
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